HMS Invincible (R05): Sold to Australia, Then Rescued by a War

Named by the Queen

HMS Invincible was ordered from Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering on 17 April 1973 and laid down at Barrow-in-Furness that same day, the lead ship of her class and, in a nice piece of naval tradition, the seventh Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

The name is worth following back, because two of the previous six are among the most consequential ships the Royal Navy ever had, and for opposite reasons. The first was not British at all: L'Invincible was a French 74-gun ship of the line captured by Anson's squadron off Cape Finisterre in May 1747, at a moment when the Royal Navy did not possess a single 74 of its own. The Admiralty took one look at her, had every inch of her measured and drawn, and then spent the next fifty years building British copies. By Trafalgar something like three quarters of the British line of battle were two-decker 74s descended from that one captured French hull. She herself was lost on a sandbank in the eastern Solent in 1758 when her rudder jammed, and her remains lie there still, a protected wreck that archaeologists have been excavating within sight of Portsmouth. The other one to know about is the battlecruiser of 1907, which blew up at Jutland in ninety seconds with the loss of over a thousand men; that story is in the article on HMS Inflexible (1907). A name that has meant both the ship everybody copied and the ship that came apart in a minute and a half is carrying a certain amount of history.

Her construction was delayed by design modifications and labour disputes, and she was finally launched by Queen Elizabeth II on 3 May 1977, entering Royal Navy service on 19 March 1980 and formally commissioning that July, becoming fully operational in June 1981.

She also came into existence by a piece of institutional sleight of hand that is worth knowing about. The Royal Navy had been told in 1966, when the big carrier CVA-01 was cancelled, that it was out of the fixed-wing carrier business for good; it responded by designing a ship with a full-length flight deck, an island and a hangar and calling it a through-deck cruiser, on the entirely straight-faced grounds that its job was anti-submarine command and control. The full story of how that was done is in the article on HMS Illustrious (R06). Two things then had to go right for the deception to become a real capability. One was the Sea Harrier, which the Treasury tried repeatedly to kill and which was only ordered in 1975, two years after Invincible was laid down. The other was the ski-jump, worked out in the mid-1970s and added to the design while she was building, which is why the lead ship of the class got a seven-degree ramp fitted rather late in the day. Without either of them she would have been a helicopter carrier and the Falklands would have gone very differently.

Already Sold to Australia

HMS Invincible initially served as an anti-submarine warfare carrier alongside HMS Hermes, but by early 1982 her Royal Navy career appeared to be drawing to a premature close: in February that year, Australia agreed to purchase her for £175 million as a replacement for the ageing HMAS Melbourne, a sale that would have seen one of Britain's newest carriers transferred abroad barely two years after entering service, a genuine reflection of just how tight defence budgets had become by the early 1980s.

Tight is a considerable understatement, and the review that produced the sale deserves setting out, because it is one of the clearest cases in modern history of a defence decision inviting the war it was supposed to save money on. John Nott's defence review of June 1981 proposed to cut the surface fleet by about a quarter: Invincible sold to Australia, Hermes paid off, the amphibious ships Fearless and Intrepid scrapped, a fifth of the destroyers and frigates gone, dockyards closed, and the Antarctic patrol ship Endurance withdrawn from the South Atlantic. The last of those was the one that mattered. Endurance was Britain's only permanent naval presence in the region, and taking her away was read in Buenos Aires, quite reasonably, as a statement that Britain had stopped caring about the Falklands. The junta invaded in April 1982. Within a year the review had been almost entirely reversed: Invincible was kept, Hermes stayed on for a while, Fearless and Intrepid were reprieved and both went on to serve for another twenty years, and Endurance was retained. The whole episode is taught in staff colleges as an example of how defence economies can turn out to be extremely expensive.

Rescued by War

Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982 changed everything: just three days later, a naval task force headed by HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes sailed from Portsmouth bound for the South Atlantic, carrying eight Sea Harrier fighters and twelve Sea King helicopters.

Eight Sea Harriers does not sound like a fleet air arm and it very nearly was not enough. Twenty of the aircraft went south in the end, across both carriers and then reinforced by more, and they faced an Argentine air force that outnumbered them by something like five to one and flew from proper concrete runways rather than a pitching deck six hundred miles from the nearest diversion. Every serious assessment before the war expected the Harriers to be overwhelmed. What happened instead was that they shot down twenty Argentine aircraft in air combat and lost not one of their own to another aeroplane; six Sea Harriers were lost altogether, two to ground fire and four to accidents. Two things made that possible. The first was the AIM-9L Sidewinder, supplied urgently by the Americans, which unlike every earlier version could be fired from any angle instead of only up an enemy's exhaust pipe, so that a Harrier turning into a formation head-on could shoot at once instead of having to get behind. The second was that the Argentine pilots, who flew with conspicuous courage, were operating at the very limit of their range and could not afford to turn and fight. It remains one of the most lopsided air combat records in modern history, and it was flown off two small decks by an aeroplane the Treasury had tried three times to cancel.

The deployment was not without its close calls. On 23 April, task group commander Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, who had the day before sought permission to shoot down an Argentine Air Force Boeing 707 he suspected was spotting for the carrier ARA Veinticinco de Mayo, was instead ordered to hold fire and simply track it; his ships' radars then locked onto what turned out to be a VARIG Brazilian Airlines DC-10 on the ordinary Durban-to-Rio run, a mix-up only caught when a Sea Harrier was sent up for a closer look and its pilot radioed back that it was, in fact, a perfectly innocent airliner with all its lights on. Woodward wrote the whole nerve-jangling episode up himself afterwards in his memoir, One Hundred Days.

On 21 May, Lieutenant Commander Nigel "Sharkey" Ward, commanding 801 Naval Air Squadron from Invincible's own flight deck, led an attack west of San Carlos in which his wingman, Lieutenant Steve Thomas, downed two Argentine Air Force Daggers with Sidewinder missiles, one of several such actions during a war in which Ward himself flew more than sixty combat sorties and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

On 30 May, Argentine Super Etendard aircraft launched an Exocet missile attack, but British countermeasures, including deliberately flying aircraft at low level to disguise the carriers' true positions, successfully disrupted the assault; no British vessel was damaged, and despite persistent Argentine claims of having struck HMS Invincible herself, no evidence of any such hit has ever been produced.

The reason no Exocet ever found her is less romantic than it sounds and it cost the campaign dearly. Woodward kept his two carriers well to the east of the islands, outside the effective radius at which the Super Etendards could search, find and attack without tanker support, because the loss of a carrier would have ended the war in an afternoon. That was unquestionably correct. It also meant that his Sea Harriers had to fly a hundred and fifty miles or more just to get over the landing area, which cut their time on task to a matter of minutes and left the ships in San Carlos Water defending themselves against low-level attacks with guns and short-range missiles. The men in the frigates and the landing ships knew exactly why the carriers were where they were, and a certain amount of feeling about it survives to this day. Both things are true at once: keeping Invincible out of range was the right decision, and other ships paid for it.

Running quietly alongside all of this was a rather more secret drama. Invincible had sailed south carrying ten WE.177 nuclear depth bombs, and the War Cabinet spent much of the deployment agonising over what to do with them: ordered removed on 8 April, that decision was reversed three days later once it became clear how impractical offloading them at sea actually was, before the War Cabinet changed its mind again on 28 May and had them shipped home in stages over the following weeks, transferred well away from other shipping and held in the best-protected magazines available until they were safely back in Britain, a detail the government did not publicly confirm for over twenty years.

The Sale That Never Happened

HMS Invincible's proven wartime value changed British defence thinking entirely: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser offered to cancel the sale on 1 June 1982, even before the fighting had ended, and by July 1983 the Ministry of Defence had formally withdrawn its purchase offer altogether in order to maintain a three-carrier force, a truly direct consequence of the Falklands War reshaping Royal Navy carrier policy for decades to come.

The public got their own answer rather sooner. On 17 September 1982 Invincible sailed back into Portsmouth to an enormous, fireboat-escorted homecoming, her Sea Harriers ranged out proudly on deck and thousands of small boats crowding the harbour to see her in, a far more visible verdict on the abandoned sale than anything the Ministry of Defence ever put out in a press release.

Two More Decades of Service

The years immediately afterwards were rather quieter, if no less busy: much of the 1980s was spent on NATO and Cold War fleet duties around home waters, the Mediterranean and the Norwegian Sea, the routine, unglamorous steaming that makes up most of any warship's career between the headline-grabbing bits.

HMS Invincible went on to serve for a further two decades, taking part in Operation Deny Flight and Operation Deliberate Force during the Yugoslav Wars between 1993 and 1995, leading deployments supporting 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines in 1997 under Rear Admiral Alan West, and contributing to Operation Bolton over southern Iraq before redeploying to the Balkans to support NATO action against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.

In a rather more lighthearted episode in 2003, she featured in a BBC Top Gear segment in which the racing driver known as The Stig attempted to reach 100mph on her flight deck in a stripped-down, nitrous-injected Jaguar XJS producing some 500bhp. He comfortably beat the target, reaching 109mph, but the flight deck's own ramp at the far end sent car and driver clean off the edge and into the sea below; Jeremy Clarkson promptly declared that particular Stig dead and introduced a new one in a white racing suit, a properly memorable moment of levity for a carrier whose career had otherwise been defined by remarkably serious operational service.

The End

HMS Invincible was decommissioned on 3 August 2005, just twenty months after an extensive refit that had been intended to give her a further decade of service, with HMS Illustrious taking over as fleet flagship.

Decommissioning her twenty months after a refit intended to give her another decade looks like waste, and the arrangement that followed made it worse. She was not scrapped in 2005; she was placed in what the Navy called extended readiness, the theory being that she could be brought back into service at eighteen months' notice if a crisis demanded it. In practice that meant a ship with no crew, no aircraft, no maintenance beyond the minimum needed to keep her afloat, and a steadily deteriorating machinery plant, and by 2010 nobody seriously believed she could have been regenerated at all. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review then retired the entire Harrier force along with Ark Royal, leaving the Royal Navy without fixed-wing aviation at sea for the best part of a decade, as the article on HMS Illustrious (R06) describes. Invincible was struck off the list that September, and the ship that had been the difference between winning and losing a war in 1982 was put up for sale on a website.

She was struck off the Naval Reserve List in September 2010 and offered for sale that December through what amounted to an eBay-style online auction; among the bidders was a UK-based Chinese businessman who offered £5 million with the idea of converting her into an international school in China, a scheme at least as improbable as the original Australian sale, and one the Ministry of Defence passed over in favour of Leyal Ship Recycling in Turkey.

She left Portsmouth's No. 3 Basin at 0800 on Thursday 24 March 2011, towed the entire way since her engines had long since gone, in a departure made quieter than it might otherwise have been by the simple fact that her own Sea Harriers had already been scrapped, leaving no aircraft available to fly the traditional farewell overhead; her berth was needed regardless, since sister ship HMS Ark Royal had decommissioned only the week before. Invincible arrived at Leyal's yard at Aliağa that April and, according to the company's own recycling report, was fully dismantled within ten months, with more than 93 per cent of her structure recovered and recycled, closing out the career of a carrier whose entire trajectory had been reshaped by a war that very nearly happened without her.