HMS Eagle (R05): Twenty Years From Suez to the Phantom That Never Flew

Laid Down as Audacious

HMS Eagle began life under a different name entirely. She was laid down as Audacious on 24 October 1942 at Harland and Wolff in Belfast, one of the Audacious-class fleet carriers, a larger follow-on design to the earlier Implacable class, with displacement growing from an originally planned 27,000 tons to over 32,000 tons as the design was adapted to handle bigger, heavier aircraft.

Wartime priorities shifted rapidly once the immediate threat of invasion and the worst of the Battle of the Atlantic had passed, and construction slowed considerably. She was eventually renamed Eagle on 21 January 1946, taking the name and identity of a cancelled sister ship, and launched by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, on 19 March 1946.

As completed, HMS Eagle measured just over 803 feet in length with a beam of nearly 113 feet, and displaced 43,060 tons standard, rising to over 53,000 tons at full load, a large fleet carrier by any postwar standard. Eight Admiralty three-drum boilers fed Parsons steam turbines producing 152,000 shaft horsepower across four propeller shafts, giving her a top speed of around 31.5 knots.

Construction finally finished on 1 October 1951, sea trials began that October, flying trials followed in February 1952, and HMS Eagle was formally accepted into service on 1 March 1952, nearly a decade after her keel had first been laid.

Entering Service

HMS Eagle's first air group reflected the early jet age of naval aviation: two squadrons of Supermarine Attacker jet fighters, two squadrons of Fairey Firefly anti-submarine aircraft, and a squadron of Blackburn Firebrand strike aircraft, an eclectic mix spanning properly modern jets alongside the propeller-driven types the Fleet Air Arm still relied on for many roles.

She took part in the major NATO exercise Mainbrace in September 1952, one of the alliance's largest naval exercises of the early Cold War, before visiting the Mediterranean in early 1953 and then taking her place in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1953, a spectacular gathering of the fleet to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

She joined the Mediterranean Fleet properly in February 1954.

Between June 1954 and February 1955, HMS Eagle received her first significant modification, a 5.5-degree angled flight deck and mirror landing aid, improvements that made operating jet aircraft considerably safer by allowing aircraft to land at an angle away from parked planes rather than straight down the deck's centreline, reducing the risk of a botched landing turning into a pile-up.

The Suez Crisis

HMS Eagle's only wartime service came in 1956, during the Suez Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt following President Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Under the command of Captain H. C. D. MacLean, and serving as flagship to Vice Admiral M. L. Power, who led the Mediterranean Fleet's carrier force, HMS Eagle operated a strike wing spread across ten separate squadrons: six of Hawker Sea Hawks (800, 802, 810, 895, 897 and 899 Squadrons), three of de Havilland Sea Venoms (809, 892 and 893 Squadrons) and one of Westland Wyvern turboprop strike aircraft, 830 Squadron.

Between 31 October and 5 November, Eagle and her fellow carriers Albion and Bulwark flew nearly 1,300 offensive sorties between them against Egyptian airfields and military installations, pilots sometimes flying up to four strikes a day during the brief but politically explosive campaign. The only Sea Venom lost in the whole operation, from 893 Squadron, crash-landed back aboard Eagle in an incident notable for another reason entirely: it was the first time the carrier's own cross-deck nylon safety barrier had ever been used for real. Her sick bay treated a rather different kind of casualty too, French parachutists injured over Port Said and flown out to the carrier by helicopter, a reminder that a strike carrier's job during Musketeer went well beyond simply launching aircraft.

A £31 Million Rebuild

HMS Eagle entered Devonport Dockyard in 1959 for an extensive modernisation that ran until May 1964, an enormous £31 million programme that amounted to something close to a rebuild.

She emerged with a completely reconstructed island superstructure, the new Type 984 radar capable of tracking and ranking up to 100 targets simultaneously, a fully angled 8.5-degree flight deck, two new BS5 steam catapults, and Seacat surface-to-air missiles replacing some of her older anti-aircraft guns, though she retained four 4.5-inch gun turrets.

Once back in service, HMS Eagle operated a particularly formidable air group of Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft, de Havilland Sea Vixen and Supermarine Scimitar fighters, and Fairey Gannet airborne early warning aircraft, putting her among the most capable carriers operated by any navy outside the United States at the time.

The radar deserves more than a line, because it is the part of her that has outlasted everything else. Type 984 was a three-dimensional set built by the Admiralty Signals Research Establishment, and unusually for the period it did not just tell you where a contact was; it told you how high it was as well, in one sweep. On its own that was useful. What made it revolutionary was what it was plugged into. The Comprehensive Display System took the radar's output, gave every contact an identity, and drew the whole air picture, raid size, bearing, range and height, onto a single display in front of the officer directing the fighters, with later versions working out the interception geometry for him. Digital Plot Transmission then shared those tracks between ships, so a destroyer twenty miles away saw what the carrier saw. This was the first computerised action information organisation to go to sea anywhere, and every combat system in every warship afloat today is descended from it. It was so large and so demanding that only three ships in the world ever carried it: Victorious, Hermes and Eagle.

Confrontation and the Beira Patrol

Fresh from her rebuild, HMS Eagle sailed for the Far East in 1964 to help contain the escalating Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, joining a British naval assembly of some eighty ships, the largest since the Korean War and representing roughly a third of the entire fleet. Alongside fellow carriers HMS Victorious and HMS Centaur, she helped mount standing air patrols over the Malacca Strait through 1965, part of a wider strategy built around dominating the Malacca and Singapore Straits to detect, intercept or simply deter Indonesian incursions.

She returned to a rather different kind of patrol work in March 1966, enforcing the United Nations oil blockade against Rhodesia's breakaway government in the Mozambique Channel. Beginning on 5 March, HMS Eagle remained continuously at sea for 71 days without once returning to port, a record for a British warship that stood until the first Gulf War in 1991. Her Fairey Gannet airborne early warning aircraft flew gruelling five-and-a-half-hour patrols at 15,000 feet in what squadron veterans remembered as thoroughly horrendous sea conditions, sweeping some 250 nautical miles of ocean off Beira for tankers bound for Rhodesia; across the whole seventy-one days, only two were ever detected, dealt with not by force but by a deliberately intimidating low pass from a Scimitar or Sea Vixen fighter, since an actual confrontation risked a diplomatic incident nobody wanted. Eagle stayed on station so long largely because her intended relief, HMS Ark Royal, was delayed in Singapore by engine trouble that squadron veterans' own accounts describe as outright sabotage, sand and gravel said to have been deliberately packed into her shaft bearings by a disgruntled crew member.

Trialling the Phantom, and a Decision Not to Pay

HMS Eagle underwent a further refit at Devonport beginning later that year and recommissioned in 1967, fitted with a single DAX II arrestor wire, and went on to successfully conduct trials with the new McDonnell Douglas Phantom FG1 fighter using her more powerful waist catapult, a remarkably promising sign for the carrier's future usefulness.

Unfortunately, the water-cooled jet blast deflectors needed to operate Phantoms routinely and safely were never actually fitted, meaning HMS Eagle never got to exploit the full potential the trials had demonstrated.

The decision that killed her had in fact been taken six years before the ship was paid off, and it had very little to do with jet blast deflectors. In February 1966 the Labour government published a Defence White Paper that cancelled CVA-01, the new fleet carrier the Royal Navy had been designing for a decade, along with the Type 82 destroyers meant to escort her. Denis Healey, the Defence Secretary, had accepted the Royal Air Force's argument that long-range strike aircraft, by that point the F-111, flying from bases in Australia and from uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean, could cover British commitments east of Suez more cheaply than a carrier fleet. The Navy Minister, Christopher Mayhew, resigned three days before publication. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, resigned with him. A service minister and his own professional head resigning together over a White Paper is about as loud as the Royal Navy can shout, and it changed nothing at all.

Which left two elderly carriers and one budget. The plan in February 1966 had been to give both Eagle and Ark Royal the minimum work needed to fly the Phantoms already on order, and here Eagle's luck ran out on a technicality of scheduling. Her enormous rebuild had finished in May 1964, just before the Phantom decision was finally settled, which meant that converting her properly would have required opening up a ship that had come out of dockyard hands the year before and spending a second fortune on her almost at once. Ark Royal was in materially worse condition and had not yet had her money spent. On that basis, and only on that basis, the Treasury chose Ark Royal. The better ship was rejected because she had already been refitted at the wrong moment.

That gap proved decisive. In February 1972, the government of the day, under Lord Carrington as Defence Secretary, calculated that fully refitting HMS Eagle to operate Phantoms properly would cost a further £25 to £30 million, and decided against it.

HMS Eagle was paid off at Portsmouth after twenty years and four months of service, a startlingly abrupt end for a ship that had only recently proven she could do the job, brought down not by any failure of the ship herself but by a budgetary line that the government of the day was no longer willing to fund.

There is one more thing worth recording about the bargain that was struck. The F-111s the Royal Air Force was given the carriers' money to buy were themselves cancelled in January 1968, less than two years later, on cost grounds. The bases in the Far East from which they were to have operated were given up at the same time. So the fleet carriers were scrapped in order to pay for aircraft that were never bought, to fly from bases that were closed, in a region Britain then withdrew from altogether. When the Royal Navy needed carriers in 1982 it went south with Hermes, Invincible and a few dozen Harriers, and got away with it by a margin nobody involved enjoys discussing. Eagle had been on the breakers' slip at Cairnryan for four years by then.

A Slow Final Voyage

Once paid off, HMS Eagle was stripped of much of her remaining equipment, serving as a source of spare parts to keep her sister ship HMS Ark Royal running for a few more years of active service, a quietly useful final contribution even after her own operational life had ended.

She was eventually sold for scrap and towed from Devonport on 14 October 1978 to Cairnryan near Stranraer, arriving five days later, and was already partway through demolition when HMS Ark Royal herself arrived at the same breaker's yard for scrapping on 28 September 1980, the two former sister ships meeting one last time at the end of both their careers.

One of HMS Eagle's anchors survives today at the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton, a solid, physical reminder of one of the Royal Navy's great postwar fleet carriers.