HMS Theseus (R64): From Korean Combat Patrols to Pioneering a Helicopter Assault

Built at Govan

HMS Theseus was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding at Govan, laid down on 6 January 1943, launched on 6 July 1944 and commissioned on 9 January 1946, a Colossus-class light fleet carrier that arrived just after the war she had been designed for, but would go on to see substantial combat action in a very different conflict.

The class she belongs to is worth knowing about, because it is one of the great accidental successes of British shipbuilding. The Colossus-class light fleet carriers were designed in 1942 to a deliberately austere standard: merchant ship machinery, merchant construction methods, no armour, built in commercial yards that could not handle a proper fleet carrier, with an intended service life of about three years. They were meant to be used up and thrown away. Instead the war ended before most of them were finished, and the design turned out to be exactly what a medium-sized navy could afford. Theseus and her sisters became the first aircraft carriers of Argentina, Brazil, India, the Netherlands and Canada, and one of them was still flying aircraft in the 1990s. A disposable 1942 hull outlasted the empire it was built for.

Ten Patrols Over Korea

Deployed to Korea in 1950 shortly after the outbreak of war, Theseus flew ten operational patrols, her aircraft suppressing enemy positions at Chinnampo and supporting United Nations ground forces with combat air patrols, strikes against North Korean and Chinese targets, and close air support for the American IX Corps.

Her aircrew reached the milestone of 1,000 accident-free landings on 15 January 1951, earning the Boyd Trophy for exceptional performance, a notably impressive safety record given the intensity and pace of the operations they were flying.

The thousand landings deserve unpacking, because deck landing in 1950 was genuinely dangerous work and the figure is not a bureaucratic milestone. Theseus was flying Sea Furies and Fireflies, propeller aircraft with a tail wheel and no view forward on the approach, onto a straight wooden-planked deck with no angle, no mirror landing sight and no steam catapult, in a Korean winter, from a ship that had been designed to be thrown away after three years. Every landing was flown by eye onto a moving deck under the direction of a man with two bats. A thousand of those in succession without an accident, while flying combat sorties at the same time, is why the Boyd Trophy went to her.

Relieved by Her Sister Ship

Theseus's Korean operations concluded in January 1952, when she departed for Sasebo in Japan and was relieved by her sister ship HMS Glory, closing out a demanding tour that had contributed substantially to the United Nations' air campaign during one of the war's most active phases.

Pioneering the Helicopter Assault at Suez

In 1956, Theseus was pressed into an entirely new role, serving as an emergency commando carrier alongside HMS Ocean during the Suez Crisis.

Between November and December that year, her helicopters transported troops ashore and evacuated wounded soldiers, an early and truly significant demonstration of helicopter-borne assault tactics that would go on to shape amphibious warfare doctrine for decades to come, even though her direct combat role during the crisis itself proved comparatively minor.

The First Helicopter Assault in History

The Suez operation is routinely undersold, and it should not be, because what happened on the morning of 6 November 1956 had never been done anywhere by anybody. The plan for Port Said used the conventional methods for two commandos, landing craft and amphibians onto the beach behind a bombardment, and then did something entirely new with the third. 45 Commando, six hundred and fifty Royal Marines with twenty-three tons of stores, was flown ashore directly into a contested town from the decks of two carriers lying offshore.

The aircraft were ten Westland Whirlwinds of 845 Naval Air Squadron off Theseus, and six more Whirlwinds and a dozen Bristol Sycamores of the Joint Experimental Helicopter Unit off HMS Ocean (R68). None of them was designed for the job; the Whirlwind was a small utility helicopter that could carry a handful of men, the Sycamores fewer, and the whole thing was flown in relays into a landing zone next to a fighting town. It worked. It was the first operational landing of troops by helicopter into a combat zone in the history of warfare, and everything that followed, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the Royal Marines at San Carlos, is a descendant of that morning.

There is a pleasing detail in the two ships that did it. Ocean had already put the first jet aircraft ever to land on a carrier onto her deck in 1945; nine years later she and Theseus, two austerity-built light fleet carriers with no catapults and no future, invented vertical assault. Neither had been designed for anything of the kind, and both were scrapped within six years of doing it.

Scrapped at Inverkeithing

HMS Theseus was placed in reserve in 1957 and scrapping began at Inverkeithing on 29 May 1962, closing out the career of a carrier whose contribution ranged from sustained combat flying over Korea to helping pioneer an entirely new way of putting troops ashore.