HMS Illustrious (87): The Armoured Carrier That Refused to Sink

The First Armoured Carrier

HMS Illustrious was ordered on 13 April 1937 and built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down just two weeks later, launched on 5 April 1939 and commissioned on 16 April 1940, at a cost of £2,295,000 excluding armament.

She was the lead ship of a revolutionary class of aircraft carrier, fitted with an armoured flight deck and hangar sides, three inches of protection over the deck and four and a half inches around the hangar, a design philosophy that traded aircraft capacity, she could carry only around 36 planes initially, later increased to 57, for a degree of survivability no other nation's carriers of the era could match.

Crippling the Italian Fleet at Taranto

HMS Illustrious deployed to the Mediterranean in August 1940 under Rear Admiral Lumley Lyster, and on the night of 11 to 12 November that year launched 21 Swordfish biplanes in two waves against the Italian battle fleet anchored at Taranto, a particularly audacious night attack against a heavily defended harbour.

The raid was a spectacular success: it rendered the battleship Conte di Cavour unavailable for the remainder of the war and badly damaged the Littorio and the Duilio, in a single stroke crippling half of Italy's battleship strength and demonstrating, more than a year before Pearl Harbor, exactly what a determined carrier strike against a fleet at anchor could achieve.

Absorbing a Beating No Other Carrier Could Survive

HMS Illustrious paid a heavy price for her success during Operation Excess in January 1941, when German and Italian dive bombers inflicted devastating damage, striking her repeatedly. It was here that her armoured design proved its worth beyond question: naval historian J.D.

Brown later wrote that 'the armoured deck saved her from destruction; no other carrier took anything like this level of punishment and survived', a notably remarkable testament to a design choice that had, at the time she was ordered, been a considerable gamble.

HMS Illustrious underwent temporary repairs at Alexandria before transiting the Suez Canal and sailing all the way to the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia for permanent repairs, work that lasted from May to November 1941. On her return voyage that December, she collided with her own sister ship HMS Formidable, requiring yet further repairs at Cammell Laird, a frustrating coda to an already long and difficult recovery.

The Indian Ocean and the Pacific

HMS Illustrious took part in Operation Ironclad, supporting the invasion of Madagascar in May 1942, her aircraft flying 209 sorties, before further refits and a transfer to Force H for the Salerno landings in August 1943.

She joined the Eastern Fleet in January 1944, striking Japanese targets in the Dutch East Indies and Andaman Islands, including attacks on Sabang in April 1944 and Palembang in January and February 1945, before joining Task Force 57 of the British Pacific Fleet in March 1945 for the preliminary operations against Okinawa, flying 234 offensive and 209 defensive sorties during that campaign.

A kamikaze near-miss on 6 April 1945 caused extensive hull damage, finally forcing her withdrawal from the front line that May, a fitting final action for a ship that had spent the entire war absorbing punishment other carriers simply could not have survived.

A Trials Carrier, Then Retirement

HMS Illustrious was spared from the planned invasion of Japan and instead converted into a Home Fleet trials and training carrier, conducting deck-landing trials for most of Britain's postwar naval aircraft through the early 1950s, including the first turboprop carrier landing by a Fairey Gannet in June 1950 and the first swept-wing carrier landings by a Supermarine 510 that November, properly important pioneering work at the dawn of the jet age.

She ferried troops to Cyprus during civil unrest in November 1951 and took part in the Coronation Fleet Review in June 1953, completing 1,051 deck landings by April 1954.

She was paid off at the end of February 1955, placed in reserve at Gareloch, sold on 3 November 1956, and broken up in early 1957, closing out the career of a carrier whose armoured deck had, quite literally, saved her from a fate that befell so many of her less well-protected contemporaries.