HMS Implacable (R86): From Hunting the Tirpitz to Striking the Japanese Home Islands

Built on the Clyde

HMS Implacable was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding at Govan, her keel laid down on 21 February 1939, launched on 10 December 1942 by the future Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and commissioned on 28 August 1944, the lead ship of the Implacable-class fleet aircraft carriers. She displaced 32,110 long tons at deep load, measured 766 feet 6 inches overall, and could reach a genuinely brisk 32.5 knots, carrying up to 81 aircraft and armed with eight twin 4.5-inch dual-purpose gun mounts alongside extensive anti-aircraft armament, with a crew of around 2,300 officers and ratings.

Hunting the Tirpitz

HMS Implacable's very first mission, undertaken barely two months after commissioning, saw her helping search for the German battleship Tirpitz in Norwegian waters in October 1944, part of the Royal Navy's long and determined campaign to neutralise one of the most powerful and dangerous ships in the German fleet. Her aircraft also took part in Operation Athletic that same period, sinking six ships and damaging a German submarine, a genuinely productive start to her operational career for a carrier that had only just entered service.

Striking the Home Islands

HMS Implacable transferred to the British Pacific Fleet in 1945, and attacked the major Japanese naval base at Truk in June that year, before going on to strike targets in the Japanese Home Islands themselves as the war entered its final, most intense phase. Her aircraft flew over 1,000 sorties during her Pacific operations, a genuinely demanding operational tempo that placed her at the very forefront of Allied naval air power in the last months of the war against Japan.

Bringing the Prisoners Home

HMS Implacable's role following Japan's surrender shifted to genuinely humanitarian work: she transported over 2,000 British, American and Canadian prisoners of war, along with returning troops, home throughout the latter part of 1945, a welcome and deeply meaningful task after years of brutal captivity for the men she carried, and a fitting final wartime duty for a carrier that had spent her active service hunting battleships and striking the enemy's home territory.

The End

HMS Implacable was decommissioned on 1 September 1954 and sold to Thos. W. Ward for breaking up on 27 October the following year, ultimately scrapped at Inverkeithing, closing out the career of a carrier whose combat service, though comparatively brief given her late entry into the war, had genuinely spanned the full breadth of the conflict's final year, from the fjords of Norway to the shores of Japan itself.