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.

Quickly and cheaply is putting it mildly, and the thinking behind the class is one of the more remarkable miscalculations in British shipbuilding. The light fleet carriers were designed as disposable warships. The Admiralty wanted decks in the water fast, accepted that they would be unarmoured and slow by fleet-carrier standards, had the hulls built to Lloyd's merchant specifications rather than warship ones, and worked to an assumed service life of roughly three years, on the reasoning that the war would be over by then and the ships could be thrown away. Not one of them managed to be disposable. Glory served sixteen years. Four of her sisters and every one of the follow-on Majestics were sold or loaned to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India and the Netherlands, and the last of the type was still commissioned in 2001, fifty-seven years after the first one floated. Nothing lasts like a temporary measure.

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 anchored in St George's Channel off Rabaul, under the command of Captain Anthony Wass Buzzard, to host the formal surrender of Japanese forces across New Britain, New Ireland, the Solomons and New Guinea, some 139,000 troops covered by the single document signed on her flight deck. Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee, commanding the First Australian Army, accepted the surrender from Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura for the Japanese Army and Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka for its naval forces in the region, a particularly significant piece of ceremony to have fallen to a ship that had only commissioned five months earlier.

It is worth pausing on that figure of 139,000, because it is not a garrison, it is a small city. Rabaul had been the main Japanese base in the South West Pacific, and rather than assault it the Allies had simply gone round it and left it to wither, so by September 1945 it held an enormous force that had been cut off, bombed and largely forgotten for the better part of two years. All of it, across New Britain, New Ireland, the Solomons and New Guinea, came under a single document signed on the flight deck of a ship that had been in commission for five months. The choice of venue was not accidental either: a carrier deck is the largest flat surface a navy owns, it is unmistakably foreign territory, and it puts the ceremony somewhere the surrendering commander has to be brought out to rather than received.

The two men who mattered most on that deck both went on to lives worth knowing about, and they could hardly have gone in more different directions. Glory's captain, Anthony Buzzard, was forty-three at Rabaul and had spent three months standing over her fitting out before he ever took her to sea. He inherited his father's baronetcy three months after the surrender, and from 1951 to 1954 he was Director of Naval Intelligence.

What he did next is the part that matters. In the mid-1950s American strategy rested on massive retaliation: any serious Soviet move would be answered with the full weight of the nuclear arsenal. Buzzard, more than anyone else in Britain, argued that this was not a strategy at all but a bluff, because a threat that enormous is a threat nobody believes you will carry out, and an unbelievable threat deters nothing. What he proposed instead he called graduated deterrence, a response scaled to the provocation, small enough to be credible and therefore actually frightening. He spent the rest of his life arguing it in print and in committee rooms, and the shape of Western nuclear thinking from the 1960s onwards owes a good deal to him. His papers are at Cambridge. He died in 1972.

The man on the other side of the table had a stranger road still. Hitoshi Imamura was tried by an Australian military court at Rabaul between 1 and 16 May 1947, convicted and sentenced to ten years. The sentence was light by the standards of those trials because the charge was failing to prevent the mistreatment of prisoners and civilians rather than ordering it, and the mistreatment was real and extensive; nothing that follows changes that. What is unusual is what he asked for. He requested that he serve his sentence on Manus Island, with his own soldiers, rather than at Sugamo in Tokyo with the other senior officers, and by one account the request made an impression on MacArthur.

He was moved to Sugamo in the end and released in January 1954. He then gave the entire proceeds of his memoirs to the families of his victims, built a replica of his prison cell in the garden of his house, and lived in it, alone, until he died in 1968. Make of that what you like. It is either the only genuine act of contrition to come out of the Japanese high command or an extremely elaborate way of avoiding having to live in the world; possibly both. Either way, the man who signed for a hundred and thirty-nine thousand troops on a British flight deck spent the last fourteen years of his life in a shed he had built to look like a cell.

As for the troops themselves, roughly seventy thousand servicemen and twenty thousand civilians surrendered at Rabaul alone. They were interned on the island and repatriated over the following two years, which is a logistical operation of a scale nobody thinks about when they picture a surrender ceremony. Glory had steamed away long before it was finished.

Among her ship's company for that 1945 Pacific commission was a young coder by the name of Charles Causley, who went on to become one of Britain's best-loved twentieth century poets. He later wrote "The Song of the Dying Gunner AA1", explicitly dated to his time aboard HMS Glory, published in his 1951 debut collection Farewell, Aggie Weston, proof that a light fleet carrier's flight deck could apparently inspire more than just aircraft handling drills.

The title of that collection is worth explaining, because almost nobody now catches it. Aggie Weston was Dame Agnes Weston, who in May 1876 opened a house just outside the dockyard gate at Devonport as a hostel where sailors could go on a run ashore and find something other than a public house; the sign offered coffee, comfort and company for one penny. A second followed at Portsmouth in 1881, Queen Victoria granted a royal warrant that made them the Royal Sailors' Rests, and for three generations every rating in the Navy knew them simply as Aggie's. Weston died in 1918 and was the first woman ever buried with full naval honours. When Causley called his first book Farewell, Aggie Weston, he was saying goodbye to the Navy in the only language the lower deck would have recognised.

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.

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.

Her Korean air group flew Hawker Sea Furies and Fairey Fireflies from squadrons including 804, 812 and 821 Naval Air Squadron, and across her three tours she flew something like 25 operational patrols, her second tour alone running five in barely three months between 27 January and 5 May 1952.

Those bare tour dates undersell what her air group actually did. On the first deployment alone she flew 2,892 operational sorties. In September 1951 her carrier air group put up 66 offensive and 18 defensive sorties in a single day, which stood as a record; in March 1953 the ship beat it with 123 sorties in a day. Across the three tours she completed twenty-five combat patrols, more than any other British carrier in the war, and she was doing it with piston-engined Sea Furies and Fireflies against a shore that had jets over it. The Commonwealth carriers rotated the job between them, Glory handing over to HMAS Sydney and later to HMS Ocean and taking it back again, as described in the article on HMS Ocean (R68). Between the four British ships and the one Australian, something like 23,000 operational sorties were flown off Korea for the loss of 22 men in combat, which for three years of low-level work over defended ground is a figure that still looks wrong.

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.

The name went to the breakers with her, and it had carried a good deal by then. The battleship that held it before her escorted the first Canadian troop convoy of the Great War and finished as flagship of the British squadron in the Arctic, and her story is told in the article on HMS Glory (1899). Between them the two ships covered the China Station, Gallipoli, Murmansk, the Japanese surrender in the South West Pacific and three winters off Korea, which is a fair spread for a name that has not been used since 1961.