HMS Triumph (A108): From the First Carrier Strikes of Korea to a Second Life as a Repair Ship

Built on the Tyne

HMS Triumph was built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company on the Tyne, laid down on 27 January 1943, launched by Lady Mountbatten in October 1944 and entering active service in May 1946, a Colossus-class light fleet carrier capable of operating 42 aircraft from her 690-foot flight deck.

A Name Older Than the Royal Navy Itself

She was the eleventh HMS Triumph, and the name is very nearly the oldest in continuous use. It was introduced in 1561 for a forty-two gun ship that was sold in 1618, and by the time this one was launched on 2 October 1944 the battle honours attached to it ran: Armada 1588, Dover 1632, Portland, the Gabbard and Scheveningen in 1653, Lowestoft, the Four Days Battle, Orfordness, Solebay, the Schooneveld and the Texel through the Dutch wars, Cornwallis's Retreat in 1795, Camperdown in 1797, Calder's Action in 1805, Basque Roads in 1809, Tsingtao in 1914, the Dardanelles in 1915 and the Malta convoys of 1941. To that list she added Korea 1950. There is something worth pausing over in a ship flying rocket strikes off the Korean coast under a name that had fought the Spanish Armada.

She was late for the war she was built for. The additional equipment fitted while she was on the stocks pushed her completion out to 9 April 1946, so she never saw war service, which was the fate of most of her class; the thinking behind those hurriedly built light fleet carriers, and why the Admiralty regarded them as more or less expendable, is set out in HMS Glory (R62) and in the Colossus class guide.

The First Carrier Strikes of the Korean War

After joining the Home Fleet as a training carrier, Triumph deployed to the Far East, and when war broke out in Korea in 1950 she found herself the sole British carrier in the region.

Why She Was There at All

The sole British carrier in the region did not get there by anticipating anything. Triumph had gone out to the Mediterranean in 1947 as flagship of the Flag Officer (Air) and was transferred to the Far East in 1949 for an entirely different reason: the Chinese Communist armies were winning, the change of government in China was obviously coming, and the Royal Navy wanted more presence on the China Station while it happened. She was on passage to Hong Kong on 25 June 1950 when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel. The fleet was recalled to Japan, and by 29 June she was under American operational command, which is how a carrier sent to watch one revolution ended up opening the air war of another.

Her aircraft flew the war's very first carrier strikes on 3 July 1950, targeting the airfield at Haeju, and she went on to provide critical air support during the landings at Incheon that September, one of the most decisive amphibious operations of the entire conflict, before returning to Japan later that month.

The Morning of 3 July

The first carrier strike of the Korean War was flown by two navies at once, and the division of labour matters. Triumph put up every Seafire she had, twelve of them from 800 Naval Air Squadron, together with nine Fireflies from 827, and they went in with rockets against the airfield at Haeju, which the charts of the time still called Kaishu. The American carrier USS Valley Forge, working the same morning, sent her aircraft against the airfield at Pyongyang. Neither strike found any enemy aircraft to destroy. Both were airborne before most of the world had worked out that there was a war on.

Nineteen days later her Supermarine Sea Otter, an amphibian nobody thinks of as a combat aircraft, went down onto a rough sea to pick up an American Corsair pilot and got him out. Her crew were commended for it. It is the sort of thing that never makes a battle honour and is remembered for a lifetime by exactly one man.

Flying Museum Pieces at a War

What she was flying is the real story of her tour. The Seafire FR.47 was the last and heaviest development of the Spitfire, a magnificent aeroplane and a poor deck-landing one, carrying a Griffon engine and a contra-rotating propeller on an airframe whose undercarriage had been designed in the 1930s for grass. The Firefly FR.1 was a 1943 two-seat reconnaissance fighter. By 1950 both types had been withdrawn from every front-line squadron in the Fleet Air Arm except the two that happened to be embarked in Triumph, which meant that the moment she went to war she was operating aircraft for which no support system any longer existed.

Then she was asked to fly them hard. The tempo settled at something like twenty-seven combat air patrol sorties and ten anti-submarine sorties a day, day after day, off a deck that was pitching. Seafires began to wrinkle along the fuselage from repeated heavy landings, a structural failure her engineers patched by improvisation because the alternative was to stop flying. On 30 August she went into Sasebo and took on the last six Seafires and eight Fireflies in HMS Unicorn, which were the least serviceable of the lot, because there were no others anywhere in the Far East and none were coming.

By 20 September, when she flew an armed reconnaissance over Chinnampo, the phrase used in the record is that it was flown by the only serviceable Seafires. She stood down the next day, relieved by HMS Theseus, which had Sea Furies and a supply chain. Triumph had flown the first three months of the naval air war on the last examples of two obsolete types, and had essentially used them up.

Shot Down by the Americans

On 28 July 1950 a radar contact came up that nobody could identify, and Triumph launched Seafires to have a look at it. What they found was a formation of United States B-29 Superfortresses. What the B-29 gunners saw, coming at them out of the haze, was a single-engined fighter with an in-line engine and a pointed spinner, which in that theatre in that month meant a Soviet-built Yak.

They opened fire. A round went into the fuel tank immediately behind the pilot's head, and Commissioned Pilot White got out of a burning aeroplane inside ten seconds, badly burned, and spent over an hour in a rough sea before the American destroyer USS Eversole found him. A second Seafire, flown by Lieutenant Peter Lamb, took splinter damage and got back aboard. Lieutenant John Treacher, who was leading and who later rose to be an admiral, described the whole thing with the resignation of a man who had seen the recognition training. The aircraft were already wearing identification stripes. It made no difference at all, which is the oldest lesson in aerial warfare and one that has never yet stuck.

An Extraordinary Nine-Year Conversion

Following her Korean service and a spell as a cadet training ship, Triumph underwent one of the more remarkable transformations of any Royal Navy vessel: a nine-year reconstruction between 1956 and 1965 that turned her from an aircraft carrier into a heavy repair ship, receiving the new pennant number A108.

What Nine Years of Conversion Bought

The reconstruction is easy to describe and easy to underestimate. Everything to do with flying fixed-wing aircraft came out. The hangars and the flight deck were filled with workshops, machine shops, a foundry and stores; four cranes went on; a hangar for helicopter repair was built on the upper deck; an extra level was added to the bridge structure; accommodation was fitted for the crews of the ships she would be mending; and four 40mm guns were left aboard for self-defence, which was the entirety of her armament. The propulsion machinery was not touched, so she still had the boilers and turbines of a 1943 carrier under a floating factory.

The design decision that shaped her was made early: she was going to look after escorts, not capital ships, so the heaviest repair machinery was left out and the effort went into taking destroyers and frigates alongside instead. Two could lie on either beam, four at a time, drawing steam and electrical power from her while their own machinery was opened up. The conversion cost over ten million pounds, which in the middle 1960s was the price of a new frigate, spent on a hull that had been laid down twenty-two years earlier. Whether that was value is the sort of argument the Admiralty had constantly in those years. HMS Berry Head (A191), a wartime repair ship doing the same job on a smaller scale, was the ship that held the station while Triumph came home for her own refit.

Recommissioned in January 1965, she based herself at Singapore, serving through the 1960s as a floating repair yard for the ships of the Far East Fleet, a particularly valuable if unglamorous second career supporting the day-to-day operational readiness of the entire station.

The Singapore Years Were Not Quiet

A floating repair yard for the Far East Fleet sounds like a backwater, and for a good deal of her commission it was not. She arrived in 1965 in the middle of Konfrontasi, the undeclared war with Indonesia that had British, Australian, New Zealand and Malaysian forces fighting in the jungles of Borneo and patrolling the Malacca and Singapore straits against infiltration, with a very large number of small warships being run very hard in hot, corrosive water. Keeping those hulls running was the difference between a patrol line existing and not existing.

Her second act was stranger. The Singapore naval base, the whole reason for a British fleet in those waters, closed in 1971 as part of the withdrawal from east of Suez. For a period after that, Triumph was a substantial part of what remained: a ship that could do dockyard work in a place that no longer had a dockyard. She came home in 1972, and the job she had been converted for came home with her.

Scrapped in Spain

Triumph returned to Britain in 1972 and paid off for refit at Chatham, entering reserve there before finally being struck from the naval register in 1981.

She then sat at Chatham for nine years without a role, which is a long time even by the standards of the reserve fleet, and was struck in 1981 and towed away to Spain that December. Four months later the Royal Navy went to war eight thousand miles from the nearest dockyard, and found out the hard way what a repair ship is worth. The argument that had kept Berry Head laid up but unsold for eighteen years is set out in her own account; Triumph is the one that had already gone.

She was towed from Chatham that December bound for Spain, where she was broken up, closing out a career that had seen her serve two entirely different roles, from launching the opening strikes of the Korean War to quietly keeping an entire fleet running for nearly a decade afterward.