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.

It is worth being clear about both halves of that bargain, because the armoured hangar was expensive in ways that are easy to skip past. An armoured box weighs a great deal and it sits high in the ship, so it had to be paid for with everything else: Formidable carried something in the region of thirty-six aircraft where the unarmoured Ark Royal took sixty or more, and the box itself was built to a fixed internal height that later, larger American-built aircraft would barely fit into. It also loaded the design with topweight that made her difficult to modernise afterwards, which is a substantial part of the reason she was scrapped in 1953 while her contemporaries in other navies went on for decades. The Royal Navy bought survivability and paid for it in numbers, in flexibility and in service life. In the Mediterranean in 1941 and off Japan in 1945, it was unquestionably the right purchase.

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.

The reason the Italian fleet was where the Royal Navy wanted it is a story that could not be told for thirty years. A few weeks earlier, at Bletchley Park, a young cryptanalyst named Mavis Batey had broken into the Italian naval Enigma for the first time; the first message read was the cryptic "today's the day minus three", and three days later came the signal reporting an Italian battle fleet putting to sea to attack the convoys running to Greece. The intelligence was incomplete, but it was enough for Admiral Cunningham to know roughly what was coming and roughly when, and to concentrate his fleet south of Crete to meet it. Formidable's Albacores went looking for a fleet whose existence and intentions the Royal Navy already knew about, which is a very different proposition from searching an empty sea.

What that night achieved is worth stating in full. The Italians lost the heavy cruisers Zara, Fiume and Pola and the destroyers Alfieri and Carducci, all sunk in a few minutes at point-blank range by British battleships that had found them in the dark by radar, and Vittorio Veneto went home badly damaged. Not one British ship was lost. More important than the arithmetic was what followed: after Matapan the Italian main fleet did not again put to sea against any British force known to contain a battleship or a carrier. The Mediterranean was still an extremely dangerous place, but the danger came from aircraft and submarines rather than from the Regia Marina's battle line. Cunningham went to Bletchley Park a few weeks afterwards to say so in person, telling the codebreakers that the victory was entirely due to Dilly Knox and his girls.

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. Among the Corsair pilots flying low-level strafing runs against the fjord's anti-aircraft defences on those last two dates was a young Canadian, Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray of 1841 Squadron, whose courage that August earned him a mention in despatches and a name the Navy would hear again within the year.

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. Eyewitnesses recalled that the pilot judged his first approach poor and coolly went round again before committing to his final dive, an unsettling display of skill from a man who plainly had no intention of flying home.

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, among them the Air Engineer Officer, Lieutenant Commander Knox, who lost an eye, while Lieutenant Berger was killed in the Operations Room and Petty Officer Lambe of the aircraft handling party later died of his wounds.

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. Her captain, Philip Ruck-Keene, is remembered for firing off a suitably exasperated signal to the fleet flagship afterwards, met by an equally dry reply from Admiral Sir Philip Vian aboard HMS Indomitable, the kind of gallows humour that kept a battered flight deck crew going.

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 and killed Petty Officer George Hinkins, a pompom gunlayer struck by a Corsair wheel dislodged in the blast, with four more wounded.

A hastily devised warning system nicknamed 'anti-hawk', introduced in the days after the 4 May attack, very likely saved lives during this second strike. Flight Commander Keith Quilter, on the flight deck when the kamikaze bore in, later recalled someone frantically waving a red flag in front of him, the signal that gave him and three fellow pilots just enough warning to scramble clear of their aircraft moments before impact.

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.

The comparison that makes the point best was drawn by an American. A United States Navy liaison officer serving in one of the British carriers, watching the same thing happen to HMS Indefatigable that spring, summed the difference up in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: when a kamikaze hits a US carrier, it is six months' repair at Pearl; in a Limey carrier it is a case of sweepers, man your brooms. It is not entirely fair to the Americans, whose unarmoured carriers carried twice the aircraft and won the Pacific war, and it is very nearly fair to Formidable. She took a 250-kilo bomb and an aircraft into her flight deck, lost eight men killed and fifty-five wounded, had a boiler room opened to the sea, and was flying aircraft again five and a half hours later.

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.

Leading a fighter sweep on 9 August 1945 was Lieutenant Robert Hampton Gray, the young Canadian last seen strafing Tirpitz's defences a year before. A Nelson, British Columbia man who had joined the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1940 before transferring to the Fleet Air Arm for pilot training, he had by now added a Distinguished Service Cross to that earlier mention in despatches, this one for sinking a Japanese destroyer barely a fortnight earlier. Against Japanese warships sheltering in Onagawa Bay that day, 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.