HMS Ocean (R68): Home to the First Ever Jet Landing on a Carrier

Built to Be Built Quickly

HMS Ocean was laid down by Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow on 8 November 1942, launched on 8 July 1944 and commissioned on 8 August 1945, a Colossus-class light fleet carrier, part of a class deliberately designed to be built quickly using mercantile rather than full naval hull construction standards, sacrificing armour protection and heavier anti-aircraft weapons in exchange for getting badly needed carriers into service as fast as possible. She was launched by Lady Olive Willis, wife of the Second Sea Lord Vice-Admiral Sir Algernon Willis, and was the largest ship the Linthouse yard had ever built, beating the previous record holder, the ocean liner Viceroy of India, by around eighty feet.

The First Jet Ever to Land on a Carrier

HMS Ocean secured a permanent place in aviation history on 3 December 1945, when the celebrated test pilot Eric Winkle Brown flew a specially modified De Havilland Sea Vampire, LZ551/G, onto her deck off the Isle of Wight, the first ever carrier landing by a purely jet-powered aircraft anywhere in the world. Ocean's captain, Caspar John, was already an officer Brown knew well from earlier deck-landing trials, which was just as well: poor weather had led the ship to order Brown to abort and return to RAF Ford, and he only pressed on regardless by telling Captain John he no longer had the fuel to make it back, a small deception in service of a rather large piece of aviation history.

Caspar John is worth a paragraph of his own, because he is not the sort of man one expects to find on the bridge of a carrier. He was the second of the five sons of the painter Augustus John, which is about as far from a conventional naval background as it is possible to get, and he became one of the Fleet Air Arm's early aviators at a time when flying was not a route to the top of the Royal Navy.

It became one. In 1960 Caspar John was appointed First Sea Lord, the first naval aviator ever to hold the post, and he held it for three years. So the officer who was talked over the radio into letting a test pilot land a jet on his deck in a heavy swell, having already told him not to, went on to run the entire Royal Navy. It is difficult to think of a better argument for the value of a commanding officer who knows when a rule is worth bending.

Conditions were far from ideal. With Ocean's stern swinging through a 24-foot arc in a heavy swell and the ship rolling four degrees either way, Brown mistimed his approach and caught the very first of the carrier's ten arrester wires rather than his intended fourth, the Vampire's tail briefly touching the deck as it juddered to a stop. He made several more landings that day, one of them catching the fourth wire as planned, and later described the take-off, free of a piston engine's torque and propeller wash, as being "like a scalded cat".

It was a pivotal moment for naval aviation, though Brown himself later admitted the trial proved rather less than the newspapers of the day, who happily printed his home address along with the story, liked to claim. With no real fix yet for a jet engine's sluggish throttle response at low speed, it would take Rolls-Royce's newer axial-flow engines, still some years off, before carrier-borne jets became a routine, everyday reality rather than a one-off feat of exceptional piloting. The Americans, racing to claim the same first with a Lockheed P-80 off USS Wake Island, would not manage a landing of their own for another nine months.

From Malta to Singapore

HMS Ocean transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet that December, disembarked her air group at Malta in June 1946 and was converted for troopship duties, running trooping trips as far as Singapore. On one such transit of the Suez Canal she ran aground for eight hours, a rather less dignified footnote to a career that would go on to include two genuine world firsts.

A Grim Night in Corfu Harbour

On 22 October 1946 the destroyers HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck mines laid in the supposedly swept North Corfu Channel, an incident serious enough to end up before the International Court of Justice. Saumarez was mined first, her bow torn open; when Volage went to take her in tow she was mined in turn a little over an hour later, losing her own bow to the blast. One veteran rating, so the story goes, calmly told a shaken young officer who had put on a steel helmet after the first explosion, "I should sit on it if I was you, Sir, it wasn't a shell, it was a mine." Both destroyers nonetheless dragged themselves back towards Corfu stern-first at barely two miles an hour, and HMS Ocean, summoned for her firefighting and medical facilities, took responsibility for the wounded once the crippled ships reached harbour in the small hours of 23 October. Forty-four men died in the incident or shortly afterwards, and the funerals held the following day drew Corfiot townspeople to the harbourside in silent, uninvited numbers. The admiral who had ordered the fateful transit, Sir Algernon Willis, later admitted he had never suspected mines might be the danger, a candid piece of hindsight from the same officer whose wife had launched HMS Ocean herself two years earlier.

Trouble Ashore in Palestine

She went on to support the British withdrawal from Palestine in May 1948, a particularly delicate and difficult operation carried out amid rising violence between Jewish and Arab communities.

Shooting Down a MiG-15 Over Korea

HMS Ocean deployed to Korea twice. Her first deployment ran from May to October 1952, sailing out with a stopover in Hong Kong to embark extra aircraft and pilots, her Sea Fury piston-engined fighters of 802 Naval Air Squadron flying regular strikes against North Korean supply lines.

On 9 August 1952, four of Ocean's Sea Furies, led by Lieutenant Peter "Hoagy" Carmichael, were bounced out of the sun by eight North Korean MiG-15 jets over Pyongyang. Rather than try to outrun jets that easily outpaced them in a straight line, the Sea Furies turned hard into a tight defensive weave that a jet's much wider turning circle simply could not follow. One MiG, slowing to stay in the fight, dropped neatly into a Sea Fury's gunsight and went down, the only air-to-air kill credited to a British aircraft in the whole Korean War, and all four Sea Furies made it back to Ocean. Carmichael, as flight leader, was awarded the official credit, though several of the pilots present, and more than a few historians since, have quietly maintained it was actually his wingman, Sub-Lieutenant Brian "Schmoo" Ellis, who fired the fatal burst, one of naval aviation's more good-natured disputes over who really got the last word against a jet.

Her second deployment ran from May to November 1953, continuing to support United Nations forces through the war's closing months.

The First Large-Scale Helicopter Assault in History

HMS Ocean joined the Home Fleet training squadron in August 1954, before achieving her second genuine milestone during the Suez Crisis of 1956, taking part in what is widely regarded as the first ever large-scale helicopter-borne assault in military history.

On 6 November 1956, helicopters operating from HMS Ocean and HMS Theseus put 650 Royal Marines of 45 Commando and 23 tons of stores ashore at Port Said in around ninety minutes, a demonstration of helicopter assault capability that would go on to shape amphibious warfare doctrine for decades to come. Ocean herself contributed eighteen aircraft to the effort, six Whirlwinds and a dozen Sycamores of her own Joint Experimental Helicopter Unit, against Theseus's ten Whirlwinds.

The operation was not entirely tidy. The reconnaissance helicopter carrying 45 Commando's commanding officer became disoriented in smoke and haze over the town and put down, by mistake, in an Egyptian-held football stadium, coming under fire before making good its escape riddled with bullet holes. Two Royal Marines, Michael Fowler and Cyril Goodfellow, were killed during the landings, a sober reminder that even a genuinely history-making operation carried a real cost.

A Funeral in Oslo, and a Soviet Protest

HMS Ocean carried the Band of the Royal Marines and a party of the Green Howards to Oslo for the funeral of King Haakon VII on 1 October 1957, with Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fraser of North Cape aboard as the Queen's official representative. She had made a visit to Helsinki that same September notable enough to prompt a formal Soviet protest, a small but telling reminder of just how closely Cold War tensions shadowed even routine naval visits during that era.

Scrapped at Faslane

HMS Ocean entered extended reserve beginning in 1958 and was scrapped in 1962 at Faslane, closing out the career of a carrier that had, remarkably, played host to two properly historic firsts within little more than a decade of each other, the world's first jet carrier landing and the world's first large-scale helicopter assault.

Both of those firsts had consequences, but the second one had the longer reach. Ocean and Theseus had been fitted out as improvised helicopter carriers for Suez because nobody had a proper one, and ninety minutes at Port Said proved the idea well enough that the Royal Navy went on to convert two purpose-adapted commando carriers, HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion, and then never gave the capability up again.

Forty-two years after Port Said the Navy finally commissioned a ship designed from the keel up to do exactly what Ocean improvised in 1956, and gave her the same name: HMS Ocean (L12), who spent her own career putting Royal Marines ashore from helicopters and is now the flagship of the Brazilian Navy. Two ships of the same name, either end of the idea.