HMS Hermes (R12): Laid Down as HMS Elephant, Reborn as the Falklands Flagship

A Wartime Order, Decades in the Making

HMS Hermes began life under an entirely different name: she was laid down by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness during the Second World War as HMS Elephant, part of the wartime Centaur-class carrier programme. Construction was halted in 1945 as the war ended and the urgent need for more carriers evaporated, and the incomplete hull sat unfinished for years before work finally resumed in 1952, initially just to clear the slipway for other ships rather than with any firm plan to complete her.

She was the fourth of four, and the other three are worth setting beside her because of how differently it went for them. HMS Centaur gave the class its name and was gone by 1972. HMS Albion (R07) and HMS Bulwark (R08) both spent their later years as commando carriers and were finished by the mid-1980s.

The six years Hermes spent unfinished on the slipway, which looked at the time like the most embarrassing thing about her, turned out to be the reason she outlived all three. Her sisters were completed to the design as drawn. She was completed to a design that had been rewritten around the angled deck, the steam catapult and radar that did not exist when she was ordered, and she was consequently the only one of the four still worth converting for Sea Harriers thirty years later. Her sisters were scrap by 1986. She was somebody's flagship until 2017.

She was launched, by then renamed Hermes, on 16 February 1953 by Clementine Churchill, wife of the sitting Prime Minister, but she remained unfinished for a further six years, not entering service until 18 November 1959, some fifteen years after she was first laid down, an extraordinary gestation period reflecting just how much naval aviation, and naval priorities generally, had changed in the years between. She had, in effect, been laid down as HMS Elephant on 21 June 1944 to fight the Second World War and was accepted into the fleet as HMS Hermes to fight the Cold War instead.

She left the builders' yard at Barrow on 1 November 1959 and was accepted seventeen days later at a modest flight deck ceremony at Portsmouth, with Captain David Tibbits DSC as her first commanding officer. For a ship that had spent the better part of two decades as an embarrassment on a slipway, a certain amount of understatement was probably wise.

That long delay proved something of a blessing: HMS Hermes was completed to a heavily revised design incorporating a Type 984 three dimensional radar system, an angled flight deck with a deck edge lift, and steam catapults, technology that would have been unimaginable when she was first ordered as HMS Elephant, giving her a modern specification despite her wartime origins.

The radar was the giveaway. Nicknamed the searchlight for the enormous rotating aerial that carried it, the Type 984 was the most capable set of its kind in the world when it appeared, and it was so large and so heavy that only three ships ever carried it: the fleet carriers Eagle and Victorious, and Hermes. Her deck edge lift, a platform of roughly 54 by 35 feet rated at close to sixteen tons, was another break with older British practice, which had put every lift on the centreline where a single jammed aircraft could shut the whole flight deck down. The Hermes badge she inherited had been approved back in February 1923: the head of the messenger god in a winged helmet, gold on a blue field, above the motto Altiora Peto, or "I seek higher things". It was meant as a reference to her aircraft rather than to her long-suffering builders.

The two other ships that carried the Type 984 are here as well, and both were considerably larger than her: HMS Eagle (R05), who went from Suez to a Phantom conversion she never received, and HMS Victorious (R38), a 1939 armoured carrier taken back to the keel and rebuilt at a cost that would have bought a new ship. Both were scrapped years before Hermes went to the Falklands. The most sophisticated radar the Royal Navy had was fitted to three ships and every one of them was gone from British service by 1978.

East of Suez with Vixens and Scimitars

For most of the 1960s Hermes worked a very long way from Portsmouth. Her early commissions took her to the Far East, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and one of the earliest photographs of her in service catches her at Subic Bay in the Philippines on 18 January 1961. Her air group of the period was a thoroughly transitional one: Supermarine Scimitar fighter bombers, de Havilland Sea Vixen all weather fighters, Fairey Gannets for airborne early warning and Westland Whirlwind helicopters riding shotgun as plane guard, four types that between them covered most of what British naval aviation had learned since 1945.

Carrier flying in that era was unforgiving, and Hermes had her share of it. On 16 November 1962, while she was operating off the Pembrokeshire coast, one of her helicopters was carrying passengers to the naval air station at Brawdy when its engine failed at 1,000 feet, a mile west of South Bishop. The aircraft came down under autorotation, rolled over on striking the rough water and sank. The crew and the Member of Parliament John Cronin were pulled out by a second Hermes helicopter after roughly half an hour in the water; Squadron Leader Stott was recovered unconscious and later died, and Lord Windlesham was never found, despite a search involving the ship's own aircraft, the Brawdy squadrons, four warships and the St David's lifeboat. Parliament was told the whole of it four days later.

Not every close call ended badly. One of her Scimitar pilots collected a Queen's Commendation for bringing his aircraft back aboard after a bird had shattered his canopy in flight, which is the sort of log entry that makes the rest of the day's flying programme look positively restful.

In May 1966 she gained a captain worth remembering. Terence Lewin took command of Hermes with John Fieldhouse as his second in command. Sixteen years later, when the task force sailed for the South Atlantic with Hermes at its head, the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Commander in Chief Fleet directing the campaign were the same two men who had once shared the running of that flagship's daily routine between them. Not many ships get to train their own war.

Their commission was not a quiet one. In May 1967 Hermes spent a fortnight off Aden, the Sea Vixens of 892 Naval Air Squadron flying border patrols over the protectorate, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside the RAF's Hunters, as a deliberate show of naval air power while Britain prepared to leave. That August she was off Hong Kong during the colony's leftist disturbances, and her Wessex helicopters put police and troops directly onto the roof of Kiu Kwan Mansion in North Point, then the tallest building in the territory and a fortified stronghold of the unrest. Inside, the raiding parties found bombs, weapons and an improvised hospital, dispensary and operating theatre included. Vertical assault onto a tower block was not among the missions anyone had in mind for her in 1944.

All the while the Admiralty was quietly trying to sell her. Having decided in 1966 that Hermes was surplus to requirements, it offered her to the Royal Australian Navy as a replacement for HMAS Melbourne, and in 1968 she exercised with the RAN in Australian waters and had Australian A-4G Skyhawks and S-2 Trackers practising landings on her deck, which is about as practical a sales demonstration as a navy can stage. Canberra looked at the running costs and the manpower bill and politely declined. It would give almost exactly the same answer fifteen years later.

Her last years as a conventional strike carrier were arguably her best equipped. By 1968 her air group had been rebuilt around Blackburn Buccaneer strike aircraft flying alongside Sea Vixens, Gannets and Wessex, which gave her a genuine punch. It also gave the Treasury a conspicuously expensive ship to look at, and in 1970 the decision was recorded to convert her into a commando carrier instead.

From Strike Carrier to Commando Ship

The work was done in Number 10 Dock at Devonport between 1971 and 1973, and it was a genuinely radical conversion: her arrester wires, steam catapults and distinctive Type 984 radar were all removed, and berthing for around 800 Royal Marines was fitted in their place alongside landing craft and some twenty Sea King helicopters, leaving a ship that, for a few years at least, would have struggled to recognise her own flight deck. The Royal Navy's retreat from fixed wing strike carriers was well under way as budgets tightened, and Hermes, the youngest of them, was the one that could most usefully be given a different job.

Operation Mercy, and a Writ in Quebec

The suggestion sometimes made that Hermes did very little as a commando carrier does not survive contact with July 1974. She was on her way back from a deployment to North America when the Greek Cypriot coup, and then the Turkish landings that followed it on 20 July, turned Cyprus into a war zone. She was sent there instead, arriving off the island on 17 July at the head of a group that included HMS Andromeda, HMS Devonshire and HMS Rhyl with RFA Olna in support. Her first job was to land 41 Commando Royal Marines, brought across from Malta, to thicken up the perimeter of the sovereign base areas at Akrotiri and Dhekelia, where the resident garrison was trying to hold a very long fence against advancing Turkish armour, retreating Greek Cypriot National Guard units and a great many frightened civilians.

On 23 July, learning that British and other foreign nationals were trapped on the beaches around Kyrenia, Captain Branson took his group into the war zone to get them out. The weather turned, the approaches were mined, and the landing craft plan gave way to helicopters: Sea Kings and Wessex, hurriedly painted with outsize Union flags in the hope that both sides would take the hint, flying in and out to lift casualties and holidaying families off a shoreline where people had already been shot. Ship's crew worked the beaches in white overalls, which made them wonderfully easy to see and, inconveniently, wonderfully easy to aim at. Over two days more than 1,500 people were taken off at Kyrenia, 919 of whom spent the night aboard Hermes, and the task group as a whole brought out 7,526, of whom 5,171 were British. One American who made it aboard is recorded as saying simply, thank God for the British Navy. A Cypriot mother went one better and named her newborn daughter Hermoula.

The ships that went to Cyprus with her are here too, which gives the operation a fuller shape: HMS Andromeda (F57), who would spend the following decade being rammed by Icelandic gunboats and then go to the Falklands; HMS Devonshire (D02), the first ship ever to fire a Seaslug; and HMS Rhyl (F129), who had done very nearly the same job at Zanzibar ten years earlier and would be the Ascension guardship in 1982.

The following June, on another North American deployment, Hermes achieved something few warships manage: she was arrested. Her commanding officer, Captain Derek Reffell, later Admiral Sir Derek, returned aboard at Quebec to find a writ waiting for him from the Marshal of the Admiralty District of Quebec ordering the ship's arrest, the result of an alleged assault ashore involving some of her libertymen, who were subsequently acquitted. With the Ministry of Defence firmly closed for the weekend and nobody entirely certain what the remedy was, Hermes took her tugs and sailed on the Monday as planned. A day later a caller claimed a bomb had been left aboard during visiting hours; the ship broke away from her supply vessels, searched herself thoroughly and found nothing. Reffell later summed the visit up as exciting and unusual, which was generous of him.

The Steepest Ramp in the Fleet

She was converted again in 1976 for anti-submarine warfare duties in the North Atlantic, where the Soviet submarine fleet had become NATO's most pressing worry, and then received a final refit between 1980 and 1981 that fitted her with a ski jump ramp specifically to support the new Sea Harrier jump jet, technology that would prove absolutely decisive within barely a year of that refit's completion.

The ski jump was a Royal Navy idea in the first place. Lieutenant Commander Doug Taylor had worked the concept up in a university thesis in 1973: a curved ramp throws a Harrier off the deck on a rising, semi-ballistic trajectory, letting the wings catch up a few hundred yards out, so the aircraft can leave far heavier than a flat deck would ever allow. Trials at RAE Bedford from August 1977 tried ramps between roughly six and twenty degrees. Hermes ended up with the steepest in the fleet at twelve degrees, against the seven degrees built into Invincible and Illustrious, and her pilots appreciated the extra height above the waves that came with it. The oldest carrier in the fleet thus finished up with the most modern bow in it, about a year before anyone had to discover whether the idea worked in anger.

Flagship of the Falklands Task Force

HMS Hermes was actually scheduled for decommissioning in 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a retirement that never came: instead, she sailed just three days after the invasion as flagship of the entire task force sent to retake the islands, carrying 12 Sea Harrier FRS1 aircraft and 18 Sea King helicopters, under the command of Captain Lyn Middleton.

Getting her to sea at all was the first battle. When the news came through she was lying alongside at Portsmouth with a thin diary and a good deal of her stores already ashore, which is precisely the state a ship reaches once everyone has agreed she is finished. The First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, put her under 72 hours notice for sea regardless, and the dockyard worked around the clock to make good the difference, storing and ammunitioning her while her squadrons flew aboard. She sailed on 5 April 1982 alongside HMS Invincible, Britain's only other operational carrier, with Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward embarked to command the battle group from her.

The other carrier is here as well, and her article explains why the pair of them mattered so much: HMS Invincible (R05) had already been sold to Australia when the invasion happened and the sale was cancelled. Between them Hermes and Invincible were the entire British capacity to put a fighter over the South Atlantic. There was no third ship, no land base within 3,800 miles, and no possibility of replacing either of them inside a year.

That is why Woodward kept Hermes so far east, and why her Sea Harriers flew to the limit of their fuel to get to the fighting. It was not caution for its own sake. If either carrier had been hit, and particularly if Hermes had, the air cover over the landings would have halved or vanished and the campaign would have ended that afternoon with an army ashore and nothing over it. The Argentine air force understood this perfectly well and spent six weeks hunting for the carriers without ever finding them, which is the single largest reason the operation succeeded. It is also why the loudest cheer in the task force was reserved for the two ships nobody in the amphibious group ever saw.

The shooting started for her air group on 1 May. Twelve Sea Harriers of 800 Naval Air Squadron went off Hermes that morning, nine of them putting twenty seven bombs into the airfield at Port Stanley and its defences while the other three cluster bombed the strip at Goose Green, destroying a Pucará and badly damaging two more. One Sea Harrier came home with a twenty millimetre hole through its tailplane and was patched up on board and flying again shortly afterwards, which says a good deal about the aircraft and rather more about the people maintaining it.

A fortnight later came the raid everyone remembers. An eight man reconnaissance party had paddled ashore on Pebble Island on 10 May and reported what it found back to D Squadron of the SAS, embarked in Hermes. On the night of 14 May, forty five men of D Squadron and 148 Commando Forward Observation Battery lifted off her flight deck in two Sea Kings of 846 Naval Air Squadron, with HMS Glamorgan standing by to provide gunfire support and HMS Broadsword screening the carrier. Half an hour on the ground was enough: eleven Argentine aircraft, six Pucará, four Turbo Mentors and a Skyvan, were left burning on the strip, for two men lightly hurt, one of them by a British charge going off early. The raiders were back aboard in time for a cooked breakfast.

Both supporting ships from that night have accounts here, and both had a harder war than the raid suggests. HMS Glamorgan (D19), who provided the gunfire support at Pebble Island, was hit on 12 June by an Exocet the Argentines had taken off a warship and mounted on a lorry, killing fourteen of her people two days before the surrender. And HMS Broadsword (F88), screening Hermes that night, was alongside HMS Coventry on 25 May when Coventry was bombed and capsized.

Reinforcements arrived on 18 May, when the Sea Harriers of 809 Naval Air Squadron and the RAF Harrier GR3s of No 1 Squadron flew off the container ship Atlantic Conveyor, every one of the GR3s going to Hermes. Their pilots had ferried those aircraft 3,600 miles from Ascension, a flight of eight hours and twenty minutes, and then made the first deck landings of their lives at the end of it. The GR3's inertial navigation system had never been meant to be aligned on a moving deck, and the Ferranti equipment rushed out to solve that problem never entirely did, so the squadron flew its first operational sortie on 20 May after precisely one day of working up.

By the time the campaign was in full swing, her air wing had grown to 16 Sea Harriers, 10 RAF Harrier GR3s and 10 Sea Kings, a formidable and hard-worked air group that provided the backbone of British air power throughout the conflict, given that Britain had no land base anywhere near the islands from which to operate conventional aircraft. As the Navy's largest and most valuable carrier, Hermes was deliberately kept further out to sea than her smaller sister HMS Invincible, her Sea Harriers operating close to the limit of their fuel endurance as a result, while her Sea Kings ferried troops ashore during the San Carlos landings on 21 May. The tempo told: between 21 and 25 May the two carriers' Harriers and Sea Harriers flew roughly 300 sorties from about thirty aircraft, while the Argentine air forces, with more than twice as many aeroplanes available to them, managed around 180. Between them, the task force's Sea Harriers accounted for more than twenty Argentine aircraft in air-to-air combat without losing a single one of their own in return, the six Sea Harriers that were lost going to ground fire and accidents instead. Hermes sailed home to Portsmouth on 21 July 1982 after 108 days at sea, some 1,700 personnel crowded aboard for a homecoming a great many people had not expected her to live to see.

The Retirement That Finally Came

The war bought her two more years rather than a new lease of life. She came home to a four month refit of her propulsion and electrical systems, both of which had comfortably earned it, and in the autumn of 1983 she took part in the NATO exercise Ocean Safari, reverting for the occasion to something close to a strike carrier with twelve Sea Harriers, ten RAF Harrier GR3s and ten Sea Kings embarked. It was her last exercise.

There was one final attempt to find her a flag of her own. Australia was offered Hermes again in 1983, this time with a squadron of Sea Harriers included in the price, and the incoming Hawke government decided once again that it did not want a carrier, closing a file that had been open since 1966. Hermes went into maintained reserve at Portsmouth in February 1984, still flying the White Ensign with a skeleton ship's company, and was towed round to Devonport in April 1986 for the refit that would prepare her for her next owner.

A Second Life as INS Viraat

HMS Hermes was finally paid off on 12 April 1984, having outlasted her originally planned retirement by two years and a war, and having served twenty four years in commission. India bought her in 1986, in a deal reported at around £65 million, and commissioned her as INS Viraat on 12 May 1987. The name is Sanskrit and means something close to giant, which was a generous description of a hull laid down as a wartime light fleet carrier, but by that point she had earned a little flattery.

What replaced her is the last piece of the explanation. The Royal Navy had spent the 1970s building the Invincible class, small through-deck ships designed round helicopters and Sea Harriers rather than catapults, and it was the arrival of those three that made Hermes surplus: HMS Illustrious (R06) was hurried into service without a proper commissioning ceremony in 1982 specifically so that she could relieve the two carriers in the South Atlantic. The irony is that the ship the new class was built to replace was the one that led the fleet to war, and then went abroad and worked for another thirty years, while two of the three ships that replaced her were themselves scrapped or sold before she was.

The Indian Navy then worked her considerably harder than anyone in Whitehall had expected. Viraat was central to Operation Jupiter, the 1989 peacekeeping deployment off Sri Lanka, and to Operation Parakram, the long mobilisation that followed the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. By the time she decommissioned at Mumbai on 6 March 2017 she had, under the Indian flag alone, spent some 2,252 days at sea, steamed 588,287 nautical miles and logged more than 22,622 flying hours, and had collected a Guinness World Record as the longest serving warship in the world. Half a century after the Admiralty had decided she was surplus to requirements, she was still somebody's flagship.

Even then her story was not quite over. Campaigns in two Indian states to save her as a museum ship, backed by public crowdfunding, delayed her fate for several years, but she went to auction in July 2020 and was knocked down to a Gujarat ship breaker for a little over 38 crore rupees, roughly four million pounds. She was beached at Alang on 28 September 2020, dismantling began that December, and she was already around 40 per cent gone by the time India's Supreme Court dismissed a last legal challenge to save what remained of her in 2021, on the reasonable ground that there was no longer enough ship left to preserve. Altiora Peto, her badge had promised back in 1923: I seek higher things. Laid down in one war under a name she never took to sea, completed to fight a cold one, flagship of a hot war she had been scheduled to miss by being sold for scrap, and then flagship of another navy entirely for thirty years more, she was still being argued over in a supreme court at the age of seventy seven. Few ships aim that high.