HMS Ocean (L12): The First Royal Navy Ship to Command a US Battle Group

A Purpose-Built Helicopter Carrier

The case for building her at all was made the hard way. During Royal Navy operations off the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's aviation training ship RFA Argus had been pressed into service as a makeshift helicopter carrier and found badly wanting, lacking anything close to the accommodation a properly embarked military force actually needed. Even as the resulting purpose-built replacement faced cancellation on cost grounds in February 1993, ministers pushed ahead a month later regardless.

HMS Ocean was ordered on 11 May 1993, with Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd winning the contract and subcontracting construction to Kvaerner's civilian yard in Govan, Glasgow, a decision that proved controversial: VSEL's winning bid of £139.5 million undercut Swan Hunter's £210.6 million by such a margin that the National Audit Office launched a formal inquiry into whether the competition had been fair, eventually clearing the government's choice.

What that bid actually bought is worth understanding, because it explains both ends of her career. Ocean was not built to warship standards throughout. She was designed to a deliberate mixture: military specification only in the places where military performance genuinely mattered, and commercial specification everywhere else, with her structure engineered to Lloyd's Register rules in the same way a merchant ship is. That is why the work went to a civilian yard on the Clyde, and it is why a 22,000-ton helicopter carrier came in at £154 million when a warship-standard hull of that size would have cost a great deal more.

It was a sensible bargain and it worked, but a bargain has terms. A hull built to merchant rules ages like a merchant hull, and by 2018 she had reached the end of the life she had been designed to have rather than the end of the life a conventionally built warship might have offered. The argument about whether that was a false economy has been running ever since; what is not in dispute is that the alternative in 1993 was no helicopter carrier at all, because the programme was very nearly cancelled outright that February.

She was laid down on 30 May 1994, launched on 11 October 1995 sponsored by Queen Elizabeth II, formally named in a separate ceremony at Barrow-in-Furness by the Queen on 20 February 1998 once fitting-out was complete, and commissioned on 30 September 1998 at HMNB Devonport, at a construction cost of £154 million, a Landing Platform Helicopter designed specifically to support amphibious operations and capable of carrying up to 830 Royal Marines alongside a substantial complement of helicopters.

Straight Into Hurricane Relief

HMS Ocean deployed almost immediately after commissioning for humanitarian relief following Hurricane Mitch, one of the most devastating storms to strike Central America in modern history, off the coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua, a fitting early demonstration of the versatility her design offered beyond purely military operations. She sailed as one of three Royal Navy vessels carrying eight helicopters between them, ready within days to start ferrying aid into flood-cut communities before her ship's company had even settled into their first commission, an improbably fitting way to begin a career that would end, two decades later, exactly the same way.

The following year asked something rather different of her: in 1999 HMS Ocean was sent to the Mediterranean and held on stand-by in case her embarked forces were needed over the Kosovo conflict, a deployment that in the end demanded nothing more dramatic than presence, though presence was very much the point.

Sierra Leone and the Al Faw Landings

HMS Ocean supported Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone in 2000, joining HMS Illustrious in helping suppress rebel activity with her own embarked forces, and went on to serve as flagship for Operation Telic during the Iraq War in 2003, earning the battle honour Al Faw 2003 for her role in that campaign, working alongside HMS Ark Royal in the helicopter assault role during the initial invasion. She had sailed from Plymouth on 16 January 2003 carrying 300 Royal Marines and 400 aircrew, operating as a floating base for 22 helicopters and 200 Royal Navy medical staff who went on to treat casualties from both sides of the fighting.

A rather less martial job followed in April 2010: when ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano grounded flights across northern Europe, HMS Ocean was sent to ferry British holidaymakers stranded on the continent back across the Channel, proof that a ship built to put Royal Marines ashore under fire could just as easily bring stranded families home from Calais.

Apache Gunships Into Action From Her Deck

HMS Ocean took part in Operation Unified Protector over Libya in 2011, deploying Apache attack helicopters directly into combat, the first time Apache helicopters had ever been sent into action directly from a Royal Navy ship, a notably significant milestone for British naval aviation and a striking demonstration of just how far amphibious helicopter carriers had come since her own commissioning.

She sailed as flagship of a small task group that also included the destroyer HMS Liverpool, minehunter HMS Bangor and two Royal Fleet Auxiliary support ships, spending four months off Libya and 87 days continuously at sea. Across 22 missions between June and October her embarked Apaches, flown by 656 Squadron Army Air Corps, struck more than 100 targets with 99 Hellfire missiles and almost 4,800 rounds of 30mm cannon fire, while a strengthened 12-strong medical team, equipped for the occasion with a mobile digital X-ray machine, stood by to treat any casualties the missions produced.

Hosting the Olympics

HMS Ocean provided logistics support and accommodation at Greenwich during the London 2012 Olympic Games, a considerably more peaceful assignment than her recent combat deployments, but one that still called on the same fundamental capability: providing a large, self-sufficient floating base wherever it was needed.

Fleet Flagship, Then Commanding an American Task Force

HMS Ocean underwent a major refit between 2012 and 2014, costing £65 million and lasting 15 months, before becoming the Royal Navy's Fleet Flagship in June 2015.

In November 2016 she achieved a remarkable distinction, taking command of United States Task Force 50, the American formation responsible for maritime war fighting in the Persian Gulf, the first time a Royal Navy vessel had ever commanded that particular American task force, a striking symbol of the close and enduring cooperation between the two navies. The change-of-command ceremony took place aboard USS Dwight D Eisenhower, the carrier Ocean was relieving on station, where Commodore Andrew Burns took charge of a task force covering roughly 2.5 million square miles of ocean from the outgoing US Rear Admiral James Malloy, who called the handover "a wise investment in this region's future." "Today marks the start of another chapter in this partnership as the Royal Navy takes on the privilege of leading a US task force in the Middle East for the first time," Commodore Burns said. Alongside Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring, Ocean kept up the British presence in the Gulf.

Known throughout the fleet as the Mighty O, she spent her tenure as command ship hosting US Marine Corps Ospreys on her flight deck for training, Commander Adie Baker, her Commander Air, noting that the tiltrotor's extra range and speed "demonstrates how flexible and versatile HMS Ocean is and improves the ability of the Royal and US Navies to work together."

A Career That Ends the Way It Began

In September 2017, with Hurricane Irma tearing through the Caribbean and Hurricane Maria close behind, HMS Ocean was pulled off her planned task as incoming flagship for NATO's Standing Maritime Group 2 in the Mediterranean and sent west instead. "We are diverting a second ship to the Caribbean, our flagship HMS Ocean, to bring the help that will be needed in reconstruction after the hurricanes have passed," said the then Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon, announcing the change of tasking after a COBRA meeting.

She arrived off Tortola on 22 September carrying around 650 personnel, nine helicopters, four landing craft and 60 tonnes of aid, and had a 96-strong team including six marine and weapon engineers ashore within a day to assess the British Virgin Islands' shattered infrastructure. "We not only have a wealth of experience and knowledge across different fields of engineering, but physically have the tools and equipment to really make a difference," said Lieutenant Fergus Holland, Ocean's deputy weapon engineer officer, as his team set to work on the island's incinerator, telecommunications and power plants. Her Commanding Officer, Captain Robert Pedre, put it more simply: "My ship's company and embarked forces are highly trained and we are ready to make a real difference."

By the time her stint in the region was over, Ocean had steamed more than 11,000 miles, flown 253 hours across 81 aid sorties, airlifted 1,081 people between islands and launched her landing craft nearly 200 times to put 600 people and stores ashore at 17 separate locations, helping push the total UK military presence in the Caribbean past 2,000, at the time the largest single UK deployment anywhere in the world. It was, in its way, a neat piece of symmetry: the ship that opened her Royal Navy career delivering Hurricane Mitch relief in 1998 closed it delivering hurricane relief again, nineteen years and two storms later.

Retiring as Brazil's Flagship

HMS Ocean was decommissioned on 27 March 2018 at Devonport, with Queen Elizabeth II (her lady sponsor since that first launch twenty-three years earlier) greeted by a 21-gun salute and joined by First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Philip Jones and more than 500 of the ship's company and their families, before being purchased by Brazil for £84.6 million and commissioned into the Brazilian Navy as NAM Atlantico on 29 June 2018, where she continues to serve as that navy's flagship, a fitting continuation for a ship whose entire British career had been defined by exactly the kind of flagship leadership role she now performs for an entirely different fleet.

For all that, HMS Ocean was a comparative minnow next to the carrier that eventually inherited her flagship duties: at 22,000 tonnes and 203 metres she was roughly a third the size of HMS Queen Elizabeth's 65,000 tonnes and 280 metres, a useful reminder that in the Royal Navy, tonnage has never been the only measure of what a ship actually achieves.