HMS Glory (R62): From Accepting a Surrender to Three Tours of Korea

Built in Belfast

HMS Glory was laid down on 27 August 1942 at Harland and Wolff's Belfast yard, a Colossus-class light fleet carrier displacing 13,400 tons standard, 695 feet long, and capable of 25 knots on 40,000 shaft horsepower from four Admiralty three drum boilers. She carried an anti-aircraft armament of 4 by 40mm QF two pounder guns and 32 by 20mm Oerlikon cannon, a design built quickly and relatively cheaply to get much needed carrier capacity into the fleet during the darkest years of the war.

She was launched on 27 November 1943, sponsored by Lady Cynthia Brooke, wife of Northern Ireland's Prime Minister, and finally commissioned on 2 April 1945, arriving just in time to take part in the closing stages of the Second World War.

Receiving a Surrender at Rabaul

HMS Glory proceeded to the Pacific carrying air squadrons equipped with Barracuda and Corsair aircraft, joining the British Pacific Fleet at Sydney. Her most historically striking moment came on 6 September 1945, when she arrived at Rabaul under the command of Captain Anthony Wass Buzzard to formally receive the surrender of the Japanese garrison there, a particularly significant piece of ceremony to have fallen to a ship that had only commissioned five months earlier.

HMS Glory went on to support the recapture and reoccupation of Hong Kong, before ferrying Commonwealth troops home to Australia and Canada and finally returning to the United Kingdom in 1947.

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Three Tours Over Korea

HMS Glory spent a period in reserve before returning to active operational service for the Korean War, deploying to Korean waters in April 1951 for the first of what would become three separate wartime tours: April to September 1951, January to May 1952, and November 1952 to May 1953. Flying strike and reconnaissance sorties in support of United Nations forces, HMS Glory's Korean deployments represented a truly sustained commitment, three full tours over the best part of two years, a demanding operational tempo for a carrier and her air group.

Among her crew during this period was the future poet Charles Causley, who served as a Chief Petty Officer Coder and later wrote several works drawing on his wartime and naval experiences.

A Quieter Final Chapter

HMS Glory's final years of service after Korea were considerably less dramatic, spent as a ferry carrier, troop transport and helicopter base through to 1954. She was placed in reserve in 1956, her active career over, and was eventually sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping at Inverkeithing in 1961, closing out the career of a carrier whose service had stretched from receiving a wartime surrender in the Pacific to flying combat sorties over Korea less than a decade later.

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