HMS Hermes (95): The World's First Purpose-Built 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. 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.

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, 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.

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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 alongside the Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire to try to evade an approaching Japanese carrier strike force, the formidable Kido Butai. She was caught by around 85 Aichi D3A dive bombers, and the attack that followed was devastating in both its accuracy and its speed.

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 her captain, 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.

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