HMS Glorious (77): Britain's Worst Naval Disaster You've Never Heard Of

An Odd Sort of Battlecruiser

HMS Glorious was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, laid down on 1 May 1915, launched on 20 April 1916 and completed that October at a cost of £1,967,223, a notably enormous sum for what turned out to be a truly peculiar ship.

As a Courageous-class battlecruiser, she displaced 19,180 long tons and carried just four 15-inch guns in twin turrets, a light armament for her size that reflected Admiral Fisher's somewhat eccentric wartime obsession with speed over armour, producing ships the fleet rather unkindly nicknamed 'the Outrageous'.

The Admiralty did not call them battlecruisers at the time, which tells you something. On paper they were large light cruisers, a category invented more or less for them, and the reason was that Fisher wanted ships that drew very little water for a landing on the German Baltic coast and was prepared to leave the armour off to get it. The full story of that scheme, and of what the fleet made of the three ships it produced, is in the article on HMS Furious (47). The short version is that Glorious was a ship with a battleship's guns, a destroyer's protection and no war to fight in.

HMS Glorious took part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in November 1917, and was present at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918, before entering reserve as the Royal Navy reassessed what to do with a class of ship that had never quite justified its own design.

Reborn as an Aircraft Carrier

HMS Glorious found her true purpose following the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which left the Royal Navy with a surplus of capital ship tonnage and a shortage of aircraft carriers.

Conversion work began in 1924, stripping away her original superstructure and replacing it with a two storey hangar and full flight deck, and she recommissioned as an aircraft carrier on 24 February 1930, capable of carrying up to 48 aircraft, a significant improvement on her sister ship HMS Furious.

Her new armament consisted of sixteen 4.7 inch guns in single mounts alongside anti-aircraft weapons, a considerably more modest fit than her battlecruiser days but entirely appropriate to her new role.

Her old guns had a considerably longer career than she did. The two twin 15-inch mountings taken out of Glorious, and the two out of Courageous, were not scrapped: they went into store, sat there for the better part of twenty years, and were eventually taken out again, refurbished and fitted to HMS Vanguard, which commissioned in 1946 as the last battleship ever completed for any navy anywhere. Guns designed in 1912 for a scheme to land an army in Pomerania, mounted in a ship sunk in 1940, went on to be the main armament of a battleship that served into the Suez era and was broken up in 1960. Very little in a dockyard is ever really thrown away.

HMS Glorious served with the Mediterranean Fleet through most of the 1930s, though not without incident: in April 1931 she collided with the French liner SS Florida in fog, a disaster in miniature that cost 25 lives and sent her to Malta for repairs, a sobering reminder that peacetime naval service carried its own genuine dangers quite apart from anything the enemy might do.

Hurricanes Without Hooks

HMS Glorious was recalled to home waters in April 1940 as war closed in around Norway, and took part in a remarkable feat of aviation during the campaign: RAF Hawker Hurricane fighters, fitted with neither arrestor hooks nor any other equipment designed for carrier landings, were successfully brought down onto her flight deck using improvised sandbag braking arrangements, the first time high performance monoplanes without tailhooks had ever landed on an aircraft carrier.

It was the kind of make-do ingenuity that characterised so much of the desperate, improvised Norwegian campaign, and it worked.

The scale of what was attempted that night deserves setting down properly. Ten Gladiators of 263 Squadron had come aboard from Bardufoss on 7 June, which was hard enough. The Hurricanes followed in the small hours of the 8th, and nobody had ever landed an aircraft of that weight and wing loading on a deck without a hook. Squadron Leader Kenneth Cross had his pilots partially deflate their tyres and lash a sandbag into each tailplane to hold the tail down and keep the aircraft from tipping onto its nose under braking, and a Swordfish went out to meet them and lead them in, flying so slowly that the fighters behind it were close to the stall the whole way. Every one of them got down. Not an aircraft was damaged and not a man was hurt, and it remains one of the more extraordinary pieces of flying in the history of the Fleet Air Arm, performed by RAF pilots who had never seen a flight deck before that evening.

Caught Alone

HMS Glorious was returning home on 8 June 1940 during Operation Alphabet, the evacuation of Norway, sailing independently with only two escorting destroyers, HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent, reportedly because of concerns over her fuel supply. At 15:45 she was detected by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, a catastrophic mismatch for a lightly defended carrier travelling without the rest of the fleet.

The word mismatch covers a good deal of ground, and the state the ship was actually in is the heart of everything argued about since. Glorious was at the fourth and least urgent degree of readiness. She was making 17 knots on twelve of her eighteen boilers, which meant she could not work up to full speed quickly even if she saw something coming. She had no aircraft in the air, none ranged on deck ready to fly, and her Swordfish struck down in the hangar rather than armed and waiting. There was no lookout in the crow's nest, the highest and furthest-seeing position in the ship. Two German capital ships were loose in the Norwegian Sea and she was crossing it alone, in daylight, in clear weather, with none of that done. Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, read the survivors' accounts and minuted the file with a sentence that has never been bettered: Glorious seems to have forgotten that she was a Man o' War.

Scharnhorst opened fire and scored her first hit at the extraordinary range of roughly 26,000 yards, one of the longest-range hits ever recorded by a naval gun on an enemy ship, a grim record she would share barely a month later with HMS Warspite's near-identical hit on the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare at Calabria. The shell struck HMS Glorious's forward flight deck, destroying two Swordfish being prepared for takeoff and, fatally, leaving a hole that prevented any other aircraft from launching in her own defence.

Both HMS Acasta, under Commander Charles Glasfurd, and HMS Ardent, under Lieutenant Commander John Barker, fought back with genuine and ultimately fatal courage, laying smoke and pressing torpedo attacks against two vastly more powerful battleships. Acasta's torpedo found its mark on Scharnhorst, tearing a hole some 14 metres across, flooding 2,500 tons of seawater into her, killing around fifty of her crew and knocking out her rear turret; the battlecruiser had to limp to Trondheim for emergency repairs and did not reach a proper dry dock at Kiel until 23 June, staying under repair for most of the rest of 1940. It was a genuinely painful price for the Germans to pay, even if it did nothing to save the ship that fired it. HMS Glorious herself went down at 18:10.

Around 900 men went into the freezing water, but rescue efforts were desperately inadequate, and it was not until the early hours of 11 June, nearly three days later, that the Norwegian merchant ship Borgund, herself simply bound for the Faroe Islands and stumbling on the scene by chance, picked up the last knot of survivors adrift on Carley floats. A German seaplane and a handful of Norwegian fishing boats accounted for a few more. Just 40 men survived in total: 38 from HMS Glorious and one each from Acasta and Ardent.

Among the dead were nearly all the airmen who had performed that impossible landing thirty-six hours earlier. Of all the RAF personnel embarked, two came home: Squadron Leader Cross and Flight Lieutenant Patrick Jameson, who spent three days on a float in the Norwegian Sea watching the men around them die of exposure before the Borgund found them. Every Hurricane and every Gladiator flown aboard at such cost went to the bottom with the ship. Cross survived the war and rose to Air Chief Marshal Sir Kenneth Cross; Jameson to Air Vice-Marshal. The evacuation of two RAF squadrons from Norway, achieved by an aviation first that nobody had thought possible, ended with the aircraft on the seabed and the pilots dead, which is about as complete a summary of the Norwegian campaign as anyone could write.

The combined losses from all three ships came to 1,519 men, 1,207 of them from HMS Glorious alone, making it the greatest single loss of life in a Royal Navy warship sinking of the entire war. Among the dead were 112 Royal Marines, bandsmen and pilots alike, a reminder that a carrier's Royal Marines detachment in 1940 did rather more than march at ceremonies.

A Controversy That Never Quite Settled

HMS Glorious's loss was compounded by a remarkably troubling failure of communication: she never transmitted an effective sighting report of the enemy battleships, and the Admiralty knew nothing of her sinking until it was announced on German radio.

Questions were also raised about HMS Devonshire, the nearest British ship, which some historians believe may have received a clearer distress signal than was officially admitted, yet maintained radio silence to protect her own sensitive mission evacuating the Norwegian royal family and gold reserves.

What Devonshire was carrying is worth spelling out, because it makes the decision less mysterious and no less bitter. She had King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav, the Norwegian government and the country's gold aboard, lifted out of Tromso the previous day, and she was under orders that overrode everything else afloat. Norway had already spent six weeks keeping that king out of German hands, a business that began when a cruiser took him off a burning quay at Molde, as told in the article on HMS Glasgow (C21); Devonshire's own career is covered in the article on HMS Devonshire (39). If her wireless office did take in a garbled enemy report and say nothing, the officer who made that call was weighing a carrier he could not see against a head of state sitting in his own admiral's quarters. It is not a decision anybody should have had to make, and the argument about whether the signal was ever received at all has never been closed.

Winston Churchill himself found the official explanation, that Glorious was simply unlucky and short of fuel, unconvincing, noting drily that she "presumably had enough fuel to steam at the speed of the convoy". The mystery deepened in 1980 when the naval historian Captain Stephen Roskill dismissed the official account outright as "bunkum" and argued that 1,519 men had died partly because of a whole chain of Admiralty errors. Roskill's own theory was that her captain, Guy D'Oyly-Hughes, had sailed home independently to prosecute a court-martial against his Commander (Flying), Commander J.B. Heath, on a charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy, after Heath had refused to fly a bombing mission he considered suicidal against ill-defined targets. Heath had already been put ashore at Scapa Flow before Glorious even sailed on her final voyage, and once her captain and the officers who might have given evidence against him were dead, the charge quietly evaporated: Heath was released without ever facing trial.

There was a Board of Enquiry, and its fate is its own small scandal. It sat in 1940, took evidence from the handful of survivors, and criticised D'Oyly-Hughes on the ground that his ship had not been in all respects ready for action; the members concluded that had he lived he would almost certainly have been court-martialled. The papers were then marked closed until 2041, which is a hundred and one years, and there they stayed until they were found at the Public Record Office and released decades ahead of schedule. No public inquiry was ever held. The question was raised in the Commons in 1945 and raised again in January 1999, and on both occasions the answer amounted to the matter being closed. Families who had been told for half a century that their men were simply unlucky were able to read the Navy's own verdict only once almost all of them were dead.

A more recent and considerably more contested theory, put forward on a dedicated website by Ben Barker, grandson of Ardent's own Lieutenant Commander John Barker, suggests a different explanation entirely: that Glorious's dash for Scapa Flow was connected to Operation Paul, a real if now largely forgotten Churchill-championed plan to mine the approaches to the Swedish port of Luleå and choke off German iron ore supplies. It is a theory built on genuine wartime correspondence, but one most professional historians still treat with considerable caution rather than as an accepted replacement for Roskill's court-martial explanation.

Decades on, with the last veterans long gone and the wreck itself never found, still lying somewhere under roughly 3,500 metres of the Norwegian Sea, the full truth of why Britain's worst individual warship disaster of the Second World War was allowed to happen remains, in the words of one historian, a matter of entrenched positions rather than settled fact.