HMS Hermes (95): The First Ship Ever Designed as an Aircraft Carrier

Designing a New Kind of Warship

HMS Hermes holds a remarkably singular place in naval history: she was the first ship in the world designed from the keel up as an aircraft carrier, rather than converted from a battleship, cruiser or liner hull as every earlier carrier, including Britain's own HMS Furious and HMS Eagle, had been. Her birth was rather less glamorous than her place in the history books suggests: laid down at Armstrong Whitworth's Walker yard on the Tyne on 15 January 1918 and launched on 11 September 1919, she then had to be towed to Devonport for fitting out after her own builder went out of business, finally commissioning on 7 July 1923, well over five years after her keel was laid.

That five-year gestation is the reason her claim to be first is argued about, and the honest answer is that it depends what you mean. Hermes was laid down in January 1918 and launched in September 1919, and no ship anywhere had ever been designed from the keel as a carrier before her. But the Japanese, who had been watching British carrier experiments closely and had a British technical mission helping them, laid down Hosho in December 1919, almost two years behind, and finished her first: Hosho was commissioned on 27 December 1922, more than a year before Hermes was ready. So Hermes was the first carrier designed and laid down as such, and Hosho was the first completed. Both navies have claimed the title ever since and both are telling the truth. The delay was not a design problem; her builder, Armstrong Whitworth, went out of business partway through, and she had to be towed to Devonport to be finished at the Navy's own pace in a postwar economy with no money in it.

Designed in the aftermath of the First World War, drawing on hard-won lessons from Britain's pioneering, improvised carrier operations during that conflict, she introduced a feature that would go on to define aircraft carrier design for the rest of the twentieth century: an island superstructure offset to one side of the flight deck, allowing a conventional bridge and funnel arrangement without obstructing flying operations across the rest of the ship. It was not a design without teething problems: her large starboard island made her genuinely top-heavy, and her crew had to manage fuel and water carefully between the port and starboard tanks simply to keep her trim, an ongoing balancing act, quite literally, on a ship whose whole design was meant to be a step forward.

The island she introduced is the single most consequential thing about her, and it is worth knowing that the argument had already been settled next door. Putting the funnel, bridge and masts into one block on the starboard side, leaving the rest of the deck clear, is the arrangement every aircraft carrier in every navy has used ever since; the reasoning behind it, including the odd question of why starboard rather than port, is set out in the article on HMS Eagle (1918). Hermes and Eagle were being worked out at the same time, in the same country, from the same hard-won experience of flying aeroplanes off improvised decks in the First World War, and between them they produced the shape of the modern aircraft carrier before anybody had quite worked out what carriers were for.

HMS Hermes displaced 10,000 tons standard, rising to around 13,000 tons at full load, and measured 600 feet in length, a truly modest size by the standards of the fleet carriers that would follow her, roughly a third the displacement of American Lexington-class or Japanese Akagi and Kaga carriers built from converted battlecruiser hulls. She was, by the Admiralty's own reckoning, ill-suited to operating in the rougher waters of home and European fleets, which is largely why her career instead played out on the China Station and in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

She was, in effect, an auxiliary carrier design, built to operate a useful air group without requiring the enormous displacement that came with converting an existing capital ship hull.

Two Decades of Pioneering Service

HMS Hermes spent the 1920s and 1930s helping pioneer Royal Navy carrier aviation alongside her contemporary HMS Eagle, working out the tactics, techniques and procedures that would prove essential once naval air power came to dominate the Second World War.

She served on the China Station conducting anti-piracy operations, and helped protect British interests during periods of genuine regional tension, including Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the fighting around Shanghai in 1937, small but telling previews of the much larger Pacific conflict that lay ahead.

A Solitary Taste of Battle

For all her pioneering design work, HMS Hermes fought only one proper fleet action in her entire career. On 8 July 1940, in the tense weeks after France's surrender, her Swordfish biplanes attacked the powerful Vichy French battleship Richelieu at Dakar, scoring a torpedo hit that was followed up by depth charges dropped from a motor boat, a suitably improvised finish for a fight the elegant new carrier concept had never really been designed to pick.

Overwhelmed Off Ceylon

HMS Hermes met her end on 9 April 1942, operating off Ceylon with a badly depleted air group following recent losses, when she sortied from Trincomalee harbour, under the command of Captain Richard Onslow, alongside the Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire to try to evade an approaching Japanese carrier strike force, the formidable Kido Butai, whose aircraft that day flew from three of the very carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor four months earlier: Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu.

The phrase badly depleted air group is doing a great deal of work, and the truth is starker: she sailed with no aircraft aboard at all. After the Japanese raid on Colombo on 5 April, Hermes and Vampire had been sent round to Trincomalee to prepare for Operation Ironclad, the planned British invasion of Vichy-held Madagascar, and her aircraft, 814 Squadron, had been landed ashore for it. When the warning of a raid on Trincomalee came on 8 April, the correct move was to get the ships out of the harbour, so she sailed empty, on the reasoning that open sea was safer than a known target. She was spotted the next morning off Batticaloa by a reconnaissance floatplane from the battleship Haruna. The British intercepted the sighting report, understood exactly what it meant, ordered the ships back to Trincomalee at best speed and scrambled fighters to cover them. Six Fulmars of 273 Squadron got there. They were too late and too few.

She was caught by around 85 Aichi D3A dive bombers, and the attack that followed was devastating in both its accuracy and its speed.

What arrived was not a raid but the same instrument that had destroyed the American Pacific Fleet four months earlier. Nagumo launched 85 Aichi D3A dive bombers with nine Zeros as escort, and the strike was led by Mitsuo Fuchida, the officer who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor and sent the signal Tora Tora Tora. At least thirty-two of those aircraft attacked Hermes. A dive bomber pilot of that standard, attacking an unarmoured ship with no air cover and no meaningful anti-aircraft armament, is not conducting a battle; he is conducting an execution, and the survivor's description of bombs going through the flight deck like a finger through tissue paper is exactly right. She took upwards of forty hits in about ten minutes. What the same force had done to two heavy cruisers four days earlier is described in the article on HMS Cornwall (56).

Survivor Sam Curtis later recalled that 'every bomb was on target, they went through our flight deck like sticking your finger through tissue paper', a stark description of just how little protection her unarmoured flight deck offered against a concentrated dive bombing attack.

HMS Hermes's ammunition magazines exploded, her bridge took a direct hit that killed Captain Onslow along with everyone else on it, and fires spread rapidly through the stricken ship.

Within roughly fifteen minutes she was listing severely to port, and Curtis recalled giving the order, 'over the side lads, every man for himself, good luck to you all.' HMS Hermes sank at 11:00am that morning, the first aircraft carrier ever sunk by aircraft launched from another carrier, a grim historical first for a ship that had, two decades earlier, pioneered the very design concept that made such an attack possible in the first place.

The historical first is worth stating precisely, because it is often stated loosely. Carriers had been sunk before, and aircraft had sunk plenty of ships. What happened off Batticaloa on 9 April 1942 was the first time an aircraft carrier was sunk by aircraft flying from another aircraft carrier, and it happened to the ship that had invented the type. There is a hard lesson buried in it that both navies learned that year and the Americans then applied at Midway two months later: a carrier without her aircraft is not a warship at all. She has almost no guns, no armour worth the name, and a hull full of aviation fuel and bombs. Her entire defence is the aeroplanes on her deck, and Hermes had left hers on a runway in Ceylon.

Her escort fared no better. HMAS Vampire fought back with everything she had, surviving two near misses before a bomb wrecked her boiler room and left her dead in the water; four more direct hits followed in quick succession, and she broke apart, bow and stern sinking separately within minutes of each other. Her own commanding officer, Commander William Moran, was among the eight men killed outright, with a ninth dying of his wounds days later.

The destroyer that died with her had been through this once already. HMAS Vampire was a First World War V-class destroyer, twenty-five years old, transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, and on 10 December 1941 she had been one of the escorts of Force Z when Japanese aircraft sank Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya. She spent that afternoon pulling men out of the oil, and among the several hundred she saved was Repulse's captain, William Tennant, the same officer who eighteen months earlier had walked out onto a breakwater at Dunkirk, decided a ship could be berthed against it, and thereby got two-thirds of the British Army home; that story is in the article on HMS Grenade (H86). Four months after saving him, Vampire was caught in the open sea by the same kind of aircraft that had sunk the ships she rescued him from. A bomb broke her back and her bow and stern went down separately.

The one mercy of that morning was that help was close at hand: the hospital ship Vita had witnessed the attack and moved in to pull survivors from both ships out of the water, ferrying them to Colombo for treatment, a small measure of order restored after fifteen chaotic minutes that had cost the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy well over three hundred men between them.