HMS Furious (47): The Ship Where Naval Aviation Was Invented, One Dead Pilot at a Time

A Battlecruiser With Two Enormous Guns

HMS Furious began life as one of the strangest capital ship designs the Royal Navy ever built, a modified Courageous-class battlecruiser conceived to support Admiral Lord Fisher's ambitious and ultimately abandoned Baltic Project.

She was laid down at Armstrong Whitworth's Low Walker shipyard on 8 June 1915, launched on 18 August 1916, and commissioned on 26 June 1917, built astonishingly light on armour and carrying just two enormous 18-inch guns, one forward and one aft, a properly radical design that traded protection almost entirely for speed and firepower.

Those guns deserve a paragraph, because there has never been anything like them in British service. The 18-inch was the heaviest naval gun the Royal Navy ever built, and Furious was to carry two of them in single turrets on a hull with almost no armour, which is a combination nobody has attempted before or since. It did not work. Firing trials showed that the overpressure from the muzzle blast simply damaged the ship carrying the gun, which is what happens when you mount the largest weapon in the world on a hull built for speed. The mountings came out. The guns themselves were far too valuable to waste, so they went into the shallow-draught monitors General Wolfe and Lord Clive, and on 28 September 1918 General Wolfe used hers against a railway bridge at Snaeskerke, four miles south of Ostend, at a range of 36,000 yards. That is a little over twenty miles, and it is still the longest range at which any Royal Navy ship has ever fired at an enemy.

The scheme behind all this was Admiral Fisher's, and it is worth knowing how the Navy regarded it. Fisher wanted to land an army on the German Baltic coast, which required warships that drew very little water, carried very large guns and went very fast, and which therefore had to give up armour altogether. Three were built: Courageous, Glorious and Furious. The Baltic Project was quietly abandoned, leaving the Royal Navy with three fast, enormous, entirely unprotected ships and no obvious use for them, and the fleet named them accordingly. They were known throughout the service as Outrageous, Uproarious and Spurious. All three eventually became aircraft carriers, which turned out to be the best thing anybody could have done with them.

That original design never survived intact. While still under construction, her forward turret was removed and replaced with a hangar and a short flight deck, and in November 1917 her aft turret went the same way, replaced by a landing deck over a second hangar.

The arrangement proved almost immediately unworkable: turbulence from her funnel and superstructure was so severe that only three of thirteen landing attempts on the aft deck ever succeeded, the funnel's hot exhaust gases whipping up dangerous eddies right across the touchdown area, before further attempts were banned outright.

The First Deck Landing, and a Fatal Third Attempt

It was aboard HMS Furious, on 2 August 1917, that naval aviation crossed a genuine threshold: Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning landed a Sopwith Pup on the moving ship, the first person in history to land an aircraft on a ship underway.

He repeated the feat successfully on 7 August, but died attempting a third landing days later when his engine lost power on the approach. The deck party grabbing at his wingtips, the standard technique of the day in the total absence of arrestor gear, lost their hold in a sudden gust, and the Sopwith Pup went over the side with Dunning still in the cockpit, knocked unconscious by the impact and drowned before he could be pulled from the water, a remarkably sobering reminder of just how dangerous this brand new discipline was, even for the man who had just pioneered it.

It is worth being precise about what Dunning was attempting, because the technique has no modern equivalent. There were no arrester wires, no batsman, no angled deck and no landing aids of any kind. The method was to fly up alongside the ship at just above her own speed, sidestep across the bow onto the short forward deck, cut the engine, and let a party of sailors grab the aircraft's wingtips and toggles and physically drag it down before it could be blown over the side. It worked twice. On the third attempt the engine faltered on the approach, a gust took the aircraft as the deck party had hold of it, and it went over the side with Dunning stunned in the cockpit. Every piece of equipment on a modern flight deck, the arrester wire, the mirror sight, the angled deck that lets a pilot who misses simply fly round again, exists because of the problem that killed him.

His replacement, Frederick Rutland, calculated grimly that landings of this kind, using the aft deck's flawed layout, would likely kill a pilot within roughly ten attempts even in good weather, a risk assessment that speaks volumes about the primitive state of carrier aviation at the time.

Once recommissioned with her aft flight deck completed on 15 March 1918, HMS Furious flew anti-Zeppelin patrols over the North Sea, and in July 1918 launched seven Sopwith Camels in the Tondern raid, a truly audacious carrier strike against German Zeppelin sheds, one of the first true carrier air strikes in history.

It was rather more than one of the first: Tondern is the first carrier-launched air strike against a land target in history, and it worked. Seven Camels flew off between 03:13 and 03:21 on 19 July 1918, one turning back with a bad engine, and the leading section arrived over the German airship base at 04:35 to find it entirely unprepared. They put their bombs into the double shed the Germans called Toska, which was large enough to hold two Zeppelins and had both L54 and L60 inside it at the time; the shed and both airships burned, and a captive balloon went with them. One man was lost. The Camels had no means of getting back aboard, so the pilots who reached the coast ditched alongside the fleet or came down in Denmark and were interned. Twenty-three years later the same idea, aircraft launched from a carrier against a target ashore, would be used at Taranto and at Pearl Harbor.

Rebuilt as a True Aircraft Carrier

HMS Furious underwent a complete transformation between June 1921 and September 1925 at Devonport, emerging as a truly dedicated fleet carrier. Every trace of her original superstructure, masts and funnel was removed, replaced by a continuous flight deck 576 feet long, sloped upward near the stern to help slow aircraft that, in that era, still lacked brakes.

She could carry around 36 aircraft across a two-level hangar system, and like her fellow early carrier HMS Argus, she was built entirely flush-decked, without any island superstructure at all, navigated instead from a small position at the leading edge of her flight deck. A small island was finally added during a further refit in early 1939, alongside a modern battery of dual-purpose anti-aircraft guns.

Through the interwar years, HMS Furious served as a genuine proving ground for the Fleet Air Arm, trialling practically every aircraft type in its inventory and achieving the first ever carrier night landing, by a Blackburn Dart, on 6 May 1926, before taking her place in the Coronation Fleet Review of 1937.

Norway and Near-Constant Ferry Duty

HMS Furious replaced the sunk HMS Courageous in the Home Fleet on 2 October 1939, and joined operations off Norway from 10 April 1940 with a bare complement of eighteen Swordfish and no fighters at all.

Her aircraft made repeated but largely unsuccessful torpedo attacks on German shipping at Trondheim and Narvik through mid-April, suffering losses to flak and foul weather, and on 18 April a German bomber's near miss shook her propeller shafts out of alignment badly enough to limit her to 20 knots until emergency repairs could be carried out.

From the summer of 1940 onwards, HMS Furious increasingly became the Royal Navy's carrier workhorse, ferrying desperately needed fighters across the globe rather than fighting fleet actions herself.

She carried Hurricanes to West Africa for onward delivery to Egypt in late 1940 and early 1941, then became a fixture of the Gibraltar-to-Malta aircraft pipeline through much of 1941, delivering well over a hundred Hurricanes to the besieged island across repeated voyages, including a record single load of 64 fighters in June 1941.

That same month brought tragedy: a crashing Hurricane struck her island during a delivery run, killing 14 men and starting a serious fire on her flight deck.

Arctic Raids and a Return to Malta

HMS Furious joined HMS Victorious for a raid on the German-occupied Arctic ports of Kirkenes and Petsamo in July 1941, sinking a small vessel and damaging oil storage and jetties at Petsamo, before returning once more to ferry duty, running further Hurricane deliveries towards Malta that August and September, after which she sailed to Philadelphia for a lengthy refit, not returning to Britain until April 1942.

HMS Furious played a central role in Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the desperate effort to resupply Malta, flying off 38 Spitfires before HMS Eagle was torpedoed alongside her, then returning to deliver two further batches of Spitfires that same month, work that, quiet and unglamorous as it was compared to fleet actions, kept Malta's fighter defences alive at the moment they needed it most.

Operation Torch and the First Seafire Kill

HMS Furious took part in Operation Torch, the November 1942 invasion of French North Africa, her Seafires strafing the Vichy French airfield at Tafraoui and shooting down a Dewoitine D.520, the first ever air-to-air kill recorded by a Seafire.

Her aircraft went on to help destroy dozens more enemy aircraft on the ground at La Senia airfield and covered the landings at Oran, an impressive combat debut for the navalised Spitfire variant.

Repeated Strikes Against the Tirpitz

HMS Furious transferred to the Home Fleet in early 1943 and spent much of that year on training and diversionary operations, before joining a series of increasingly determined strikes against the German battleship Tirpitz, sheltering in Norwegian fjords.

Operation Tungsten on 3 April 1944 was the most successful of these: forty Barracuda dive bombers scored fourteen confirmed hits on the German battleship, though flying too low for their armour-piercing bombs to penetrate her main deck, the strike nonetheless kept Tirpitz under repair for three months.

Further attacks followed through 1944, including Operation Mascot in July, during which her Barracudas launched from a temporary wooden ramp fitted to her flight deck, an early prototype of what would later become known as the ski-jump, though a German smokescreen defeated the raid regardless.

The final round of attacks, Operation Goodwood that August, achieved only a single armour-piercing hit that failed to detonate, the Tirpitz proving a stubborn target right through to the end of HMS Furious's active combat career.

The End

By September 1944, HMS Furious's age and accumulated limitations had become impossible to ignore, and she was placed in reserve on 15 September that year.

She was formally paid off in April 1945, berthed at Loch Striven, and spent her final years being used to evaluate the effects of aircraft explosives on ship structures, a quietly useful final scientific contribution from a ship that had spent nearly three decades pioneering, testing and refining the entire discipline of naval aviation.

She was sold for scrap in 1948 and completely broken up at Troon, Scotland, by 1954, closing out the career of a ship whose strange origins as a lightly armoured battlecruiser had, almost by accident, made her the birthplace of modern carrier warfare.

Dunning's own story was properly marked a century later, when the Royal Navy returned to Scapa Flow on 2 August 2017 to unveil a memorial plaque in his memory, crafted by the Orkney artisan Stuart Wylie and unveiled by Rear Admiral Keith Blount beneath a flypast of Hawk jets. Fittingly, HMS Queen Elizabeth, by then the largest warship the Royal Navy had ever built, lay at anchor in the very same bay where Dunning had made his fatal third attempt, a hundred years of naval aviation neatly bookended in a single afternoon.