HMS Formidable (67): From Cape Matapan to Two Kamikaze Strikes in a Single Week

An Armoured Carrier, Built at a Cost

HMS Formidable was laid down at Harland and Wolff's Belfast shipyard on 17 June 1937, an Illustrious-class fleet carrier built around a deliberate design trade-off insisted upon by Admiral Sir Reginald Henderson, the Third Sea Lord: rather than following the earlier, unarmoured HMS Ark Royal design, the new class would carry a fully armoured hangar, protection that effectively halved her aircraft capacity compared with older, unarmoured carriers, but which promised far greater survivability against bomb and shell hits.

It was a trade later fully vindicated by the punishment HMS Formidable and her sisters would go on to absorb. She displaced 23,000 tons, measured 740 feet overall, and her Parsons turbines produced 111,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 30.5 knots, carrying sixteen 4.5-inch guns and a substantial anti-aircraft fit that only grew heavier as the war progressed.

Her launch on 17 August 1939 was almost catastrophic before she had even entered the water: the wooden cradle supporting the ship collapsed just before the ceremony began, and she slid down the slipway while workmen were still underneath.

One spectator was killed and twenty more injured, though the carrier herself escaped damage, a properly grim omen for a ship that would go on to survive some of the heaviest punishment any British carrier endured in the entire war. HMS Formidable was commissioned on 24 November 1940.

The Battle of Cape Matapan

HMS Formidable worked up at Scapa Flow before sailing south, reaching Cape Town on 22 January 1941 and being redirected to the Mediterranean to replace her badly damaged sister ship HMS Illustrious. It was there, on 27 and 28 March 1941, that HMS Formidable's aircraft played the decisive role in the Battle of Cape Matapan, one of the most complete Royal Navy victories of the entire war.

Her Fairey Albacore torpedo bombers located and attacked the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto, one torpedo strike briefly knocking out her engines and causing heavy flooding, while a follow-up strike mistakenly hit the cruiser Pola instead, crippling her badly enough that Italian forces sent to assist were themselves caught and destroyed in the night surface action that followed.

During that action, HMS Formidable's own 4.5-inch guns fired a salvo at the enemy, one of the vanishingly rare occasions in the entire Second World War when an aircraft carrier engaged enemy warships directly with her own main armament.

Crete, and a Devastating Stuka Attack

HMS Formidable's aircraft supported further Mediterranean operations through the spring of 1941, including illuminating the port of Tripoli for bombardment by British battleships on 21 April, and flying combat air patrols during the desperate fighting off Greece and Crete.

Her luck ran out on 26 May 1941, as the fleet withdrew from a dawn raid on Scarpanto: German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers struck HMS Formidable with two 1,000-kilogram bombs, also blowing the bow clean off her escorting destroyer HMS Nubian in the same attack.

The bombs killed 12 men and wounded 10 aboard HMS Formidable, one bomb passing through her starboard forward flight deck before detonating and riddling her hull with holes, while a near miss blew a further large hole in her hull below the waterline.

She limped into Alexandria on 27 May, and after emergency repairs sailed all the way to the Norfolk Navy Yard in the United States for permanent repairs, arriving on 25 August 1941 and not returning to Britain until December that year.

Madagascar and Operation Torch

HMS Formidable sailed to join the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean in February 1942, helping protect the invasion of Vichy French-held Diego Suarez in Madagascar that May against the possibility of Japanese intervention, before returning home for refit that September.

She was assigned to Force H for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, sailing on 30 October 1942; her fighters shot down German Ju 88s and her Albacores laid smoke screens supporting the Algiers landings on 8 November, and a pair of her Albacores torpedoed and sank the German submarine U-331 on 17 November.

Following support for the invasion of Sicily in mid-1943, HMS Formidable became the first carrier to enter Grand Harbour, Malta, since HMS Illustrious in January 1941, a remarkably symbolic moment for a ship of the same class that had once been so nearly lost defending that very island's supply lines.

She went on to support the Salerno landings that September, feeding replacement aircraft to smaller escort carriers suffering heavy attrition during the fighting.

Attacking the Tirpitz

HMS Formidable transferred to the Home Fleet in October 1943 and, following a further refit completed in June 1944, took part in a series of attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz, sheltering in Norwegian fjords.

During Operation Mascot on 17 July 1944, her Corsairs escorted strike aircraft, though German smoke screens prevented most of her Barracuda bombers from ever seeing their target clearly enough to score hits.

Further attacks during Operation Goodwood on 22 and 24 August achieved similarly limited results, and a final attack on 29 August 1944 managed only light damage from two bomb hits, the Tirpitz proving a notably frustrating and elusive target throughout this entire campaign.

Kamikaze Attacks in the Pacific

HMS Formidable departed for the British Pacific Fleet on 14 January 1945, arriving at Sydney on 10 March with an air group of 36 Corsairs and 18 Avengers. On 4 May 1945, while her deck park of eleven Avengers was being repositioned, an undetected Japanese Zero fighter attacked at 11:31, strafing the flight deck before diving towards it despite HMS Formidable's hard turn to starboard.

The Zero released its bomb just before impact and was itself destroyed by the resulting blast, though wreckage from the aircraft still struck the ship. The explosion tore a dent 24 feet by 20 feet and two feet deep into her armoured flight deck, with a hole punched clean through its centre, killing 2 officers and 6 ratings and wounding 55 more.

A fragment penetrated the hangar deck armour and severed steam pipes in her centre boiler room, forcing its evacuation and cutting her speed to just 14 knots, yet HMS Formidable was operating aircraft again by 17:00 that same day and back up to 24 knots, a particularly remarkable testament to the value of her armoured design.

Barely five days later, on 9 May 1945, a second kamikaze pilot, Yoshinari Kurose, penetrated her combat air patrol at low altitude and crashed directly into her flight deck and deck park at 17:05. The impact damage itself was limited, but the resulting explosion and fire destroyed 18 aircraft, killed one crewman and wounded four more.

Astonishingly, HMS Formidable resumed flight operations barely fifty minutes later, though left with just four serviceable Avengers and eleven Corsairs, a stark illustration of how much punishment her armoured hangar design allowed her to absorb and keep fighting.

A Victoria Cross in the War's Final Days

Following repairs at Sydney, HMS Formidable resumed operations in late June 1945, her air group reinforced with Grumman Hellcats, and struck targets near Tokyo and Osaka from 17 July.

On 9 August 1945, during a fighter sweep led by Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray against Japanese warships sheltering in Onagawa Bay, Gray skip-bombed a 500-pound bomb into the escort ship Amakusa, sinking her within five minutes with the loss of 157 lives.

Gray's own aircraft rolled inverted moments after releasing the bomb and crashed into the sea; he did not survive. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for the action, one of the very last VCs awarded during the Second World War, earned in combat that took place just days before the Japanese surrender finally brought the fighting to an end.

Trooping Duty and the End

HMS Formidable spent the months after the war's end converted for trooping duty, carrying repatriated Australian prisoners of war, Indian Army personnel and British servicemen home from across the globe between September 1945 and February 1947. She returned to Rosyth in early March 1947 for a brief refit before being reduced to reserve and paid off that August.

A later survey found that the cumulative toll of her wartime battle damage, combined with tight postwar defence budgets, left her beyond economical repair.

HMS Formidable was towed to Spithead in 1949, then to Portsmouth Royal Dockyard in November 1952, and was finally sold for scrap in January 1953, towed to Inverkeithing to be broken up, closing out the career of a carrier whose armoured design had, time and again, proven its worth in exactly the punishing circumstances it had been built to survive.