HMS Indomitable (92): Saved From Disaster by Running Aground

A Modified Illustrious

HMS Indomitable was ordered on 6 July 1937 and built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down that November, launched on 26 March 1940 and commissioned on 10 October 1941, christened by Clementine Churchill.

A modified Illustrious-class carrier, she featured a second hangar deck positioned above the original, raising her flight deck by 14 feet and allowing her to carry between 48 and 55 aircraft rather than the standard 36 of her sister ships, a truly useful increase in striking power for a design already proven in combat.

That second hangar is the whole of her design story and it is worth understanding, because the Royal Navy tried three different answers to the same question and she was the middle one. The original Illustrious design put a single armoured box on the ship and accepted that it would only hold about thirty-six aircraft, which was the price of surviving bombs; that argument is set out in the article on HMS Illustrious (87). Indomitable, ordered slightly later, took the same hull and added a second hangar on top of the first, which raised the flight deck by fourteen feet and lifted her air group to something like fifty aircraft. The cost was that the upper hangar could not be armoured as heavily as the lower and the ship sat higher and rolled more. The third answer, the Implacables, added a second hangar and then squeezed the height of both to keep the weight down, which produced two carriers that could not stow a Corsair; that is described in the article on HMS Implacable (R86). Of the three, Indomitable's compromise was probably the best, which is why she operated Corsairs perfectly happily in 1945 while her younger sisters could not.

Saved by a Coral Reef

HMS Indomitable's very first operational voyage, to the West Indies in November 1941, ended when she ran aground on a coral reef near Jamaica, a notably embarrassing early mishap that nonetheless turned out to have a remarkable silver lining: the resulting delay prevented her from reaching Southeast Asia in time to support Force Z, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse, both of which were subsequently sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya with heavy loss of life.

The Force Z disaster deserves to be understood properly, because it is one of the great turning points in naval history and she was supposed to be part of it. Churchill had sent Prince of Wales and Repulse to Singapore as a deterrent, on the assumption that the mere presence of two capital ships would give Japan pause. Indomitable was to have gone with them to provide fighter cover, and when she put herself on a reef off Jamaica in November 1941 there was no replacement available. So on 8 December 1941 Admiral Tom Phillips took his two ships north to attack the Japanese landings on the Malayan coast without a single aircraft over him, gambling that bad weather would keep the enemy grounded and that he could get in and out before he was found. He was found. On 10 December land-based Japanese naval bombers and torpedo aircraft sank both ships in about two hours, killing 840 men including Phillips himself. It was the first time in history that capital ships under way at sea, free to manoeuvre, had been sunk by aircraft alone, and it ended the battleship as the measure of naval power at a stroke. Whether one more carrier with a squadron of Fulmars would have changed the outcome is arguable, and probably not by much. What is not arguable is that Indomitable would have been in the middle of it.

Had HMS Indomitable arrived on schedule, she would very likely have been present at that catastrophic action herself. In January 1942, she instead ferried RAF Hawker Hurricane fighters to Sumatra in a bid to reinforce Singapore's crumbling air defences before the city's fall to Japanese forces.

The Sumatra ferry run in January 1942 was a good deal more forlorn than it sounds. Singapore's air defence had been built around a handful of obsolete Brewster Buffaloes, which were comprehensively outclassed by Japanese naval fighters, and the answer settled on in London was to fly modern Hurricanes off a carrier to airfields in Sumatra and stage them forward. Indomitable made two such trips. The aircraft arrived; there were nowhere near enough of them, the pilots had no experience of the theatre, the airfields were being bombed, and the radar and ground control that had made the Hurricane so effective over Kent did not exist there. Singapore surrendered on 15 February with something over eighty thousand men going into a captivity that a quarter of them did not survive. Ferrying fighters into a collapse is a thankless job, and she did it twice.

Operation Pedestal

HMS Indomitable took part in Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the desperate and famous convoy operation to resupply besieged Malta, during which she was struck by two 500-kilogram bombs and suffered further damage from near misses, losing 6 officers and 40 ratings killed and a further 70 ratings wounded, a heavy price paid in one of the most fiercely contested convoy battles of the entire war.

Pedestal is the convoy operation everybody has heard of, and the numbers explain why. Malta was down to a few weeks of food and fuel, and in August 1942 the Admiralty sent fourteen merchant ships through the Mediterranean escorted by two battleships, four aircraft carriers, seven cruisers and thirty-two destroyers, an escort so heavy that it amounted to most of the Home Fleet. The Axis threw everything at it: some six hundred aircraft, submarines and motor torpedo boats, in a running battle of three days. Nine of the fourteen merchantmen were sunk, along with the carrier Eagle, two cruisers and a destroyer, and the tanker Ohio arrived lashed between two destroyers with her back broken and her decks awash. Five ships got in. It was enough. Eagle's own end is described in the article on HMS Eagle (94). Indomitable took two 500kg bombs and a number of damaging near misses, lost forty-six men and had her flight deck put out of action, and had to be sent home to Liverpool for six months of repairs. That is the price of five ships getting into Grand Harbour.

She underwent repairs at Liverpool's Gladstone Dock, completed in February 1943.

HMS Indomitable was back in action that July, supporting the invasion of Sicily under Operation Husky, when she was torpedoed just after midnight on 16 July, struck on the port side by an Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 of the 41° Torpedo Bomber Group, crewed by Captain Carlo Capelli and Lieutenant Ennio Caselli. The hit required yet further repairs, this time in the United States, a punishing run of damage for a single carrier within the space of less than a year.

The men who torpedoed her off Sicily deserve their names remembered, and they have them: Capitano Carlo Capelli and Tenente Ennio Caselli of the 41st Torpedo Bomber Group. The Italian aerosiluranti, the torpedo bomber squadrons, were among the very best in the world at what they did, and they are consistently underrated in British accounts of the Mediterranean war. Their aircraft, the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero, was a three-engined machine that looked like an airliner and had a hump on its back, and the standard tactic was to come in at wave height, at night if possible, and release at a range that gave the target no time. Capelli and his crew put a torpedo into a 29,000-ton armoured carrier surrounded by an entire invasion fleet, and got away. Indomitable went to Norfolk in Virginia for repairs and did not come back to the fleet for nearly a year.

The Pacific and a Kamikaze

HMS Indomitable returned to the Eastern Fleet in early 1944, conducting bombing operations against Sumatra, the Nicobar Islands and Medan alongside her sister carriers, before joining the British Pacific Fleet in 1945 for the final campaign against Japan.

On 4 May that year, she was struck by a kamikaze off Sakishima Gunto; the impact wrecked four Corsairs, knocked out a 40mm gun director and put an arrestor unit out of action, but her armoured flight deck once again proved its worth, preventing the kind of serious damage that would likely have crippled an unarmoured American carrier.

Her final combat missions came on 31 August and 1 September 1945, striking Japanese suicide boats during the liberation of Hong Kong, a fitting final action for a carrier whose entire war had been defined by absorbing heavy punishment and continuing to fight.

The Hong Kong operation is the odd, forgotten coda to the war, and it was a race. Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, and the question of who took the surrender of Hong Kong was immediately political: the Nationalist Chinese, backed to some extent by Washington, had a good claim to it, and Britain was determined to reoccupy the colony herself and to be seen doing it. Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt was ordered to get there first. Task Group 111.2, with Indomitable and Venerable, the cruisers Swiftsure, Black Prince and Euryalus and four destroyers, left Subic Bay on 27 August and entered Hong Kong on the 30th. Not everybody had accepted the surrender. Three Japanese explosive motorboats came out from Lamma Island at the ships as they entered, and Indomitable's and Venerable's aircraft sank them and then went round the anchorages destroying the rest of the flotilla at its moorings. Those strikes are, on any reasonable reckoning, among the last British combat operations of the Second World War, flown a fortnight after it officially ended. The Japanese in Hong Kong formally surrendered to Harcourt on 16 September, and British rule resumed for another fifty-two years.

A Damaged Peace and the End

HMS Indomitable returned to the UK in November 1945 and underwent a lengthy three year refit between 1947 and 1950, becoming Home Fleet flagship in 1951.

On 3 February 1953, while exercising off Malta, a petrol leak caused an internal fire and explosion that killed seven of her crew and injured thirty-two more, and caused significant structural damage, damage that was, remarkably, simply covered in concrete and never properly repaired, a properly striking illustration of just how much of her original wartime fabric was, by that point, considered not worth the expense of restoring.

Covering the damage in concrete sounds like negligence and was in fact a decision, and it is worth explaining what lay behind it. By 1953 the Royal Navy had far more ships than money, and a wartime carrier that could not operate jets had a very short future whatever was done to her. Indomitable had already had a three-year refit between 1947 and 1950, which had eaten a great deal of the budget, and the full modernisation needed to take her into the jet age, new lifts, a stronger deck, catapults, an angled deck and everything that went with it, would have cost something close to the price of a new ship. The Admiralty had already committed that money to the Audacious class. So when a petrol explosion tore up her structure off Malta in February 1953, the sum was done and the answer was to fill the hole, get her to the Coronation Review, and put her away. She was towed to Spithead for the review, appeared in the lines looking entirely respectable, and was in unmaintained reserve by October.

She nonetheless took part in the Coronation Fleet Review of Queen Elizabeth II and conducted early jet landing trials using prototype mirror landing systems, particularly important pioneering work for the coming jet age.

With the Admiralty declining to fund the full modernisation needed to properly operate jet aircraft, she was placed in unmaintained reserve in October 1953, sold for scrap, and arrived at Faslane for breaking up on 30 September 1955, closing out the career of a carrier whose survival, from a chance grounding off Jamaica through Pedestal, a torpedo strike and a kamikaze, had been truly remarkable from start to finish.

She was hit by two bombs at Pedestal, torpedoed off Sicily, and hit by a kamikaze off Okinawa, and she was in action again after every one of them. She was very nearly present at the worst British naval disaster of the war and was saved from it by a coral reef. She flew the last British air strikes of the Second World War over Hong Kong harbour, and she was one of the ships that did the early trials work on the mirror landing sight that made jet operations at sea possible. Then a fuel leak at a peacetime exercise did what the Luftwaffe, the Regia Aeronautica and the Special Attack Units had all failed to do, and she went to Faslane in 1955 at the age of fourteen. It is not a tidy career, and there is a case that she was the most useful of all the armoured carriers, precisely because her one extra hangar meant she could carry enough aircraft to matter.