HMS Victorious (R38): From Crippling the Bismarck to a Thirty Million Pound Rebuild

Built at Newcastle

HMS Victorious was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down on 4 May 1937 and launched on 14 September 1939, though her commissioning was delayed until 14 May 1941 as wartime priorities favoured escort vessels for the Battle of the Atlantic over completing a new fleet carrier.

Nine Swordfish, at Night, in a Gale

Understrength is accurate and does not begin to cover it. HMS Victorious had commissioned ten days before she was sent after the Bismarck. Her air group was 825 Naval Air Squadron, which had joined her only days before she sailed; the ship was still working up; and rather than a full complement she had nine Swordfish and six Fulmars, because the rest of her aircraft had been landed to make room for the Hurricanes she was ferrying to Malta.

On the evening of 24 May 1941 those nine aircraft were flown off at a range of about a hundred and twenty miles, in weather that would have grounded them in peacetime, to find a battleship in the North Atlantic at night. A Swordfish is a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit and a top speed of about ninety knots with a torpedo slung under it. Most of the aircrew had never made a night deck landing.

They found her. The formation broke up in a rain squall, went in piecemeal, and one aircraft, flown by Lieutenant Percy Gick, missed on the first run, came round and went in again through the full weight of Bismarck's anti-aircraft fire to put a torpedo into her amidships. It did not get through the armour belt. What it did do was open her oil tanks.

That is the part worth understanding. Bismarck had already been holed forward in the Denmark Strait and was losing oil; the Victorious hit made it worse, and the combination is why she gave up the Atlantic and turned for St Nazaire, and why for a good part of the chase she could be followed by the slick she was leaving. Every one of the nine Swordfish got back, which nobody in the ship expected.

Their squadron commander was Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, and he was given a DSO. On 12 February 1942 he led six Swordfish of the same 825 Squadron against the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau as they ran up the English Channel in daylight, with a fighter escort of ten Spitfires against several hundred German aircraft. All six were shot down. Esmonde was killed and given a posthumous Victoria Cross. Nine months separated the two attacks, and the men who flew both were, by then, doing something that everybody involved understood to be very close to suicide.

A Hit on the Bismarck

After her first mission ferrying Hawker Hurricanes to Malta, Victorious joined the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941. Flying with only nine understrength Swordfish biplanes, her torpedo bombers still managed to score a hit, minor in itself but a genuine contribution to the chain of events that ended in Bismarck's destruction days later.

Operation Pedestal and Life as USS Robin

Victorious went on to serve on the Arctic convoy route and took part in Operation Pedestal, the critical August 1942 resupply of Malta, sustaining minor damage from Italian air attacks.

That winter, the US Navy borrowed her outright, assigning her the radio call sign Robin and refitting her at Norfolk Navy Yard with American arrester gear and radar before she flew 614 sorties over twenty-eight continuous days of combat operations in the south-west Pacific in 1943.

The American loan is worth naming properly, because it is unique. In 1943 the United States Navy had one operational fleet carrier in the Pacific. Saratoga was it; everything else had been sunk, damaged or was still being built. Britain lent Victorious, and from May to September 1943 she worked in the south-west Pacific under American operational command with an American call sign, American arrester gear and American aircraft on her deck, alongside Saratoga. No other British capital ship has ever been handed over like that, and it is the clearest possible measure of how thin the Allied margin was in the middle of that year.

Striking the Tirpitz and Surviving Kamikazes

Back home, Victorious attacked the German battleship Tirpitz in Norwegian waters during Operation Tungsten in April 1944, before transferring to the Eastern Fleet for strikes on Japanese installations in Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands.

As part of Task Force 57 with the British Pacific Fleet, she supported the Okinawa campaign in 1945 and survived repeated kamikaze attacks on 1, 4 and 9 May, her armoured flight deck proving its worth even as the strikes killed three of her crew and wounded nineteen more.

The Most Expensive Rebuild in Royal Navy History

Between 1950 and 1958, Victorious underwent the most extensive carrier reconstruction the Royal Navy ever attempted, entering Portsmouth's dry dock in October 1950 for work that dragged on for over seven years amid poor project management and constant design changes, with costs spiralling from an initial estimate of £5.4 million to just over £30 million.

She emerged with a single unified hangar, a revolutionary angled flight deck, steam catapults and the first shipborne installation of Type 984 three-dimensional radar, effectively a new ship built around an old hull.

The Radar That Made Her Worth Thirty Million Pounds

A rebuild that ran from £5.4 million to over £30 million and took seven and a half years is the sort of thing that reads as pure incompetence, and some of it was. But the ship that came out of Portsmouth in 1958 had something on her mast that no other ship in the world had, and it is worth explaining.

Type 984 was a three-dimensional radar. Conventional radar of the period gave you a bearing and a range; height had to be found by a separate set, and matching one to the other was done by hand, on paper, by people who were often wrong. The 984 gave range, bearing and height together, on one set, out to well over a hundred miles, and it was married to the Comprehensive Display System, which took the raw returns and turned them into a picture that could be handed to a fighter controller directly. It is, in a real sense, the ancestor of every modern warship's operations room.

Only three ships ever carried it: Victorious, Hermes and Eagle. She also came out with a fully angled deck and steam catapults, which is to say she came out able to operate jets, which she had not been designed to do. Whether that was worth thirty million pounds in 1958 money is a fair question. What is not in doubt is that for a few years she was the most capable air defence platform anybody had.

A Cold War Flagship

Recommissioned in January 1958, Victorious served as a training flagship, supporting Kuwait against Iraqi aggression during Operation Vantage in 1961 and deploying with the Far East Fleet to support Malaysia during the confrontation with Indonesia, a passage through the Sunda Strait in 1964 causing genuine diplomatic tension, before successfully trialling American F-4 Phantom jets in 1966.

The Sunda Straits Crisis

Genuine diplomatic tension is a mild way of putting a two-week international confrontation. On 26 August 1964 Victorious sailed from Singapore for Fremantle with the destroyers Caesar and Cavendish, and took the Sunda Strait, the channel between Java and Sumatra. Britain held that it was an international waterway through which any warship could pass. Indonesia, which was at that moment in an undeclared war with British forces in Borneo, held that it was Indonesian water.

The passage itself was an anticlimax. One Indonesian Tu-16 flew over and nothing else happened. The row afterwards was not: Jakarta protested, the British position hardened, and for a fortnight the two governments were arguing about whether a carrier group could go home the way it had come, at a moment when neither could afford to look as though it had backed down.

It was settled quietly and rather sensibly. On 10 September the Indonesian deputy foreign minister asked the British privately to avoid a misunderstanding by using the Lombok Strait instead; the Foreign Office agreed, the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister approved it, and on 12 September Victorious went home through Lombok with HMS Berwick and two other ships in company. Nobody had to say anything in public, which is usually the sign that a crisis has been handled well.

A Fire, and a Sudden End

On 11 November 1967, a fire broke out in the chief petty officers' mess during refit preparations, killing one sailor and hospitalising two more.

Though the damage itself was limited, the incident coincided with sweeping defence cuts and the decision to phase out fixed-wing naval aviation, and Victorious's captain reportedly learned that she would not recommission just one day before the scheduled ceremony.

She was paid off in 1968, sold to British Shipbreakers and towed to Faslane on 13 July 1969 for scrapping.

The end deserves a note about how it was done, because it is one of the more shabbily managed disposals in the Navy's history. The fire was small. The damage was repairable. But by November 1967 the government had already decided to give up fixed-wing naval aviation, and a partly burnt carrier in dockyard hands was a convenient place to make the saving. Her captain is reported to have learned that she would not be recommissioning one day before the ceremony was due to take place, which means her ship's company found out later than that. She had been rebuilt at enormous expense nine years earlier and had another decade in her.