Evolution of the Aircraft Carrier: Part 8: Glorious and Courageous by Dan Linton
Writer: Dan Linton

 

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Half-Sisters to HMS Furious:

 

Three ships, Furious, Courageous, and Glorious, were built as ‘Baltic cruisers’ that were meant to support an amphibious assault on the northern coast of Germany, thus they had high speed, heavy weapons (15”in Courageous and Glorious, and 18”in Furious), but a light draught of only 22’ (6.7m). When it was realized that no assault could be attempted, the British now had three hulls of limited value for the main battle line; however, they could be converted into aircraft carriers. Part 2 of this series detailed the development of Furious – its modifications in 1917, then 1918, and finally 1926 emerging as the world’s only large flush-deck fleet carrier. (1) She had a double-level hangar and a hangar-level flying- off deck at the bow that was expected to be used by the smaller, lighter aircraft in the air wing (fighters, particularly) while provision of the double level hangar did allow aircraft capacity to reach 36. (picture 1) Furious’ great problem was that, producing six times the funnel gases of Argus, the trunking along the side of the ship go so hot that the aft end of the ship was at times uninhabitable. This was the reason for regular trunking and islands in Courageous and Glorious when they were converted from cruisers. (2) They were given smaller islands than Hermes or Eagle and the space saved on exhaust trunking was given over to more space for crew accommodation.(3) (picture 2) All three ‘sisters’ had a rounded front that was designed to create less wind turbulence over the flight deck when the ship was not heading directly into the wind.(4) (picture 3) And in common with other British carriers, large cranes at the stern could lift float planes directly from the sea and they could be rolled directly into the hangar through stern doors that could open. (picture 4) Courageous joined the fleet in 1928 (picture 5) and Glorious in 1930 (picture 6). Essentially, they were built to the same design. (picture 7).

      
      
  
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Losing the Lead:

As mentioned in an earlier article (5), the British lost the lead in carrier development even before the Washington Naval Treaty gave her parity in carrier tonnage with the United States Navy. A portion of British tonnage was taken up by the early carriers – Argus, Hermes, and Eagle (6), but together these ships only supported sixty aircraft, less than the air wing of any of the giant conversions undertaken by the Americans (Lexington and Saratoga) or Japanese (Akagi and Kaga). The British completed HMS Hood but believing that the Americans would not build their Lexington super battlecruisers, now that the war was over, cancelled Hood’s three sisters they had barely started, and the plans for a new ‘Lion’ class (sometimes called ‘Super-Hoods’). When the Americans continued construction, as did the Japanese, the British, who had suffered the most of these three nations both physically and financially, were quite willing to not get involved in another arms competition. The price for this blessing was to accept parity with the USN, and to accept that while she might have as many carriers as the USN, she might well end up with fewer naval aircraft (7). Unlike the USN or IJN, the British arrived at the Washington Naval Conference with no semi-completed battleship or battlecruiser hulls for conversion to carriers: only the ‘Baltic cruisers’ were available. To try to redress this imbalance, Furious’s mid-1920’s conversion introduced the double-hangar so that 36 aircraft could be taken aboard. When Courageous and Glorious were taken in hand, they too were given double hangars and, very impressively on a ship with only a 90’(27.6m) beam, were able to carry 48 aircraft. As fast as the American and Japanese carriers, the Furious, Courageous, and Glorious, together carried almost as many aircraft as the pairs of foreign giants, but aircraft capacity alone was not the sole measure of the British’ falling behind – so were the aircraft themselves, the operation of the air wings, and the way the carriers were used in wartime. And many sources, British and others, blame the inferiority of British naval aviation on the creation of the Royal Air Force.



The Royal Air Force and the Douhet Doctrine:

On April 1, 1918, the Royal Air Force was created and given responsibility for all the operations previous undertaken by the Royal Flying Corps (Army) and the Royal Naval Air Service (Navy). Defense of the home islands, strategic bombing, close support of ground forces, coastal patrol, anti-submarine warfare, naval reconnaissance – all of these missions would now by the responsibility of a single military service. An Air Ministry would be responsible for the procurement of aircraft to satisfy the mission requirements defined by the RAF. Within two years of its creation, the RAF was ‘captured’ by the ideas of Guilio Douhet (8). Reduced to its essence, Douhet claimed that the next major war would see fleets of bombers destroying an enemy’s cities, not its army or navy. The political pressure on a government to end a war would be intense – such wars would be quick and spasmodic, so there would be little time to build more equipment. A ‘come as you are’ war – thus it was essential for a society to always have fleets of bombers in existence, ready to use (not unlike the older concept of the ‘fleet in being’). The belief in Douhet’s pronouncements was so strong that even Fighter Command was in competition within the RAF for resources with Bomber Command (9). And of course, the famous June-July 1921 series of bombings, led by Brigadier-General Billy Mitchell against naval targets, was simply more ammunition for the bomber enthusiasts in the competition for funds. Without a potential enemy with a large fleet available (and the British government in 1922 made the assumptions that war with the United States was unthinkable and no war with Japan would take place in the next ten years), then aircraft carriers and their aircraft had a very low priority in RAF and Air Ministry thinking. Only the concept of ‘not falling hopelessly behind’ the Americans and Japanese impelled the British government to approve the conversions of Furious, Courageous, and Glorious.



The Fleet Air Arm:

In 1924 the Fleet Air Arm was created but it was not a separate service, nor part of the Royal Navy. Rather, it was a branch of the RAF in the same sense that Bomber Command or Coastal Command was. Pilots of the FAA were officers of the RAF, not of the Royal Navy. “Operationally, the problem was that many pilots aboard a ship were not formally responsible to the ship’s commanding officer, in the sense that they did not belong to the same service. Friction between commanding officers and air commanders naturally survived the end of formal RAF control (May 24, 1939), the most celebrated case being the problems aboard HMS Glorious in 1940”(10). And as well “…. most of the ground staff remained RAF under different customs and in different uniforms. The RAF would not let them perform naval duties: this meant an enlarged complement aboard which greatly increased accommodation layout problems in carriers. It also meant FAA flight-deck crews were far smaller than their US counterparts which affected their ability to match US deck-operating procedures….”(11). The pilots often felt as outsiders on a carrier. There were about 200 of them in the FAA and while they had an esprit de corps among themselves, they were ignored as often as possible by the ships’ officers, men whose careers were in gunnery, communications, and navigation (12). “The aircraft carrier’s role, in the 1930’s especially, was that of ‘showing the flag’ with limited fleet exercises. During these exercises the air branch was utilized but not in any particularly useful manner. In fact, the pilots were encouraged to ‘swan off somewhere’ while the fleet got down to the real job of the exercises, manoeuvre and gunnery. During a typical commission, a pilot may come back after three months at sea with only 40 hours in his log book….”(13). Pilots got far more air time at shore stations while their observers (British carrier aircraft tended to by two- or three-seaters), usually Royal Navy by service, stayed with the ship (14). There was one marginal benefit to the RAF-FAA arrangement. Since captains on British carriers were not aviators they had no basis to overrule the judgment of RAF officers who manned the planes. British accident rates were much lower than American rates throughout the 1930’s (15) and the pilots’ views were given attention by Navy-RAF technical committees. For this reason, British carriers gave great attention to landing and take-off aerodynamics. Picture 8 above, of HMS Victorious, a late 1930’s design, shows the very pronounced ‘round-down’ at the bow (16), a feature not found on US or Japanese carriers. When the FAA finally became part of the Royal Navy just before WWII there was not enough time to undo the damage that had been done. “….the Royal Navy….fell behind its main rivals in number, types, and performance of its carriers and their aircraft….”(17).



Courageous and Glorious: the Early Thirties

These two ships were the most modern in the Royal Navy when they arrived in 1928 and 1930. Unlike earlier carriers, they were provided with no arresting wires of any kind (the longitudinal wires were removed from British carriers in 1927). Their flight decks were long enough for the planes of the early 1930’s to land on directly, without hooks, and the forward section of the flight deck was slightly higher than the aft section. (picture 9, above) There had always been concern with an aircraft missing a straight-in approach and sliding entirely off the flight deck over the sides of the ship. To prevent this, British carriers had palisades installed along both sides of the flight deck amidships (picture 10—note also the cruciform elevators in this picture). Often pilots would ‘crab sideways’ on approach to improve their view of the flight deck (18) – once over the stern they lost sight of everything except the superstructure, the approach being nose-high, tail-down – and this might end in a less than straight landing, or a straight landing but off the centre line. Landings off the centre-line could, with the larger aircraft, result in a wing getting caught in the palisades – a serious accident but rarely fatal. In 1933 Courageous was the first British carrier to adopt the transverse wire system and the tail hook for its aircraft (19). Salt water sprinklers in the hangar and foam dispensers on the flight deck (first fitted to Eagle)—by the mid-1930’s British carriers were modernizing yet the ‘deck park’ concept was not adapted from the Americans and the entire concept of the Landing Signals Officer (LSO) was stubbornly resisted by British pilots until 1939! (20) And by the mid-1930’s the forward flying-off deck (which had been copied by the Japanese in Akagi and Kaga) was no longer in use, aircraft being too heavy for such a short, unassisted take-off. Picture 11- Courageous, and picture 12 – Glorious, show how even in moderate seas opening the front of the lower hangar door was no longer a wise option. Unlike the Japanese, however, the British ships were not further modified to create a full-length main flight deck, although Glorious had her flight deck lengthened aft in 1935 to 570’ with a more pronounced round-down. “ She could be distinguished by the pair of prominent V-struts supporting the extended after part of the deck. This modification was not applied to her sister-ship.”(21) (Picture 13). In providing double-hangars for the ‘fast sisters’, some thought had to be given as to the use of the extra aircraft. Since large numbers of planes could take off with a moderate deck roll (but by the late 1930’s British carriers were being equipped with “accelorators’, also known as hydraulic catapults), mass attacks were possible but the problems of landing – the rate of one per minute was the best that any British deck crew could do given the lack of barriers and deck parks – meant that a significant fraction of a plane’s fuel could be used up in holding patterns waiting to land. The sources used in this article mention many exercises but the idea of a multi-carrier exercise does not seem to have occurred until 1929 when Furious, Courageous, and Eagle worked together for the first time(picture 14). In 1933 the three sisters launched dozens of aircraft, scoring 21 hits of 32 torpedoes dropped (22). And in 1937 another major exercise had mass attacks on a traditional battlefleet (picture 15). At no point does there seem to have been exercises involving cross-decking nor any scenarios practiced of carrier vs. carrier battle. Given that British policy foresaw after 1932 the possibility of a war with Japan, and that carriers would be sent to Singapore with other fleet elements (provided there was no ongoing conflict with Germany or Italy)(23), this lack of training is inexplicable. Normally with the Mediterranean Fleet and often based at Alexandria (picture 16), Courageous and Glorious would definitely have been sent to the Pacific had the British been involved in a war with Japan alone (24). Given the training, skills, and equipment of Japan’s carrier forces, it is unlikely these British ships would have lasted very long. As it was, when war came, these two sisters were quickly lost.

      
      
  
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The Loss of Courageous and Glorious

“In a mistaken attempt to take the offensive against U-boats, the Admiralty formed ‘hunting groups’ of one carrier and four destroyers. This meant that Hermes, Courageous, Furious, and Ark Royal….were sent to patrol in…. the hope that their aircraft could support convoys attacked by the U-boats. There were two snags in this line of reasoning: the British dared not risk the few carriers in submarine-infested waters, as the aircraft were very badly equipped to sink submarines as they only hand an ineffective anti-submarine bomb.”(25) On September 14, 1939, eleven days after WWII began for the British, torpedoes from U-39 just missed Ark Royal, but three days later U-29 spotted Courageous. Three torpedoes struck and she went down with her captain and 518 of her crew.(26)(picture 17) The carriers were immediately withdrawn from anti-submarine work.

The loss of the Glorious was far stranger than that of any other carrier. The Battle for Norway (April,1940) was lost and France was collapsing. On June 7 any remaining RAF Gladiators and Hurricaines in Norway were ordered to rendezvous with the Glorious and attempt to land, despite having no tail hooks. The weather held and all the aircraft landed safely, a wonderful achievement. But disaster struck the next day as the carrier and her two accompanying destroyers were intercepted by the battlecruisers Scharnhorst (picture 18) and Gneisenau (picture 19) to the west of Narvik. The carrier and her escorts were destroyed by gunfire, only 46 men from the three ships being saved (27). Glorious was the only fleet carrier ever to have been lost to gunfire (28). In 1986 John Winton wrote Carrier Glorious covering this incident and in Issue 1, 1994 of Warships International Vernon W. Howland, Captain, RCN (Retd) wrote “The Loss of HMS Glorious: an Analysis of the Action”.(29) Strange things happened, or failed to happen, during the encounter. No aircraft were on deck to launch, nor were any enemy action reports sent in the first half-hour of the struggle. Errors were made at all levels but the captain of the Glorious did not take escape options open to him. And the captain had requested to proceed to the Scapa Flow base as quickly as possible, thus only two escorts, in order to testify at the court-martial of his previous Air Commander. The bad blood between these men apparently had a role in Glorious’ loss (30). Finally, the captain seems to have been more concerned with the threat of submarines and is known to have commented “….as far as anti-submarine operations were concerned, no aircraft had ever sunk a submarine or ever would”(31) The captain of the Glorious had spent most of his Royal Navy service in submarines and when interecepted, Glorious and her escorts were doing 17 knots in a zig-zag pattern as an anti-submarine tactic. This attitude may explain why there no ready aircraft on the deck of Glorious but the lack of any air reconnaissance was clearly a failure. As was the failure to ‘make a run for it’ – Glorious and her escorts could make 30kts – enough to keep the Germans at maximum range for hours while support was called in and, hopefully, torpedo bombers could be launched. But the first German shells ruined part of the forward flight deck and penetrated into the upper hangar and by that time no aircraft could take off. The ultimate cause of the loss of the Glorious, as well as Courageous, was poor judgement.

    
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Modeling Corageous and Glorious:

Again, these ships will be found in 1:1250 scale metal models (Glorious – Neptun 1118; Courageous – Neptun 1119); in 1:700 waterline resins from HP-models (pictures 20,above,and 21, below); and plans are available fro m Taubman’s Plans Service (via Loyalhanna Dockyard) for a radio-controlled Glorious in 1:144 scale and a simpler model in 1:384 (32). Brian King produced an article ‘Modeling an Inter-War Aircraft Carrier: HMS Glorious 1936” – a 1:192 full hull model whose design and construction is highly detailed (33). I have included two pictures (no.22 and 23) of a model of HMS Glorious found on the Model Warships website (34). And finally, as has been true of every British carrier before the arrival of Ark Royal in 1937, there are no plastic kits in any scale of the two fast sisters, Glorious and Courageous.

Extra Pictures: Pictures 24-30 are provided to assist any modelers of these ships.

Next: The American Giants: Lexington and Saratoga

      
      
      
  
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Endnotes:

1.HMS Argus, IJN Hosho, and US Langley were all “flush-deck” carriers but they were also considered experimental vessels. HMS Furious was the only large ‘flush-deck’ carrier ever to take to sea, although many Japanese WWII conversions, and some escort carriers, had no islands. The cancelled American giant USS United States, CVB-58, would have had a flush-deck and the original designs for Forrestal and Saratoga (CVA-59 and -60) had flush decks but an island was designed and installed when the decision was made to create an angled landing deck.

2. Friedman, N, British Carrier Aviation: the Evolution of the Ships and their Aircraft, p.92-95

3. Ibid, p.102

4. Ibid, p.94

5. Part 4: HMS Hermes and HMS Eagle

6. Technically, Argus was considered as an experimental ship and so was not counted against tonnage totals.

7. Even before they were built, the Americans were speaking in terms of air wings that to the British seemed impossibly large.

8. Italian air forces in WWI began to specialize in long-range bombing, reaching Vienna before the war was over. Lifting power was essential since the Alps had to be crossed to accomplish these missions.

9. ‘The bomber will always get through’ was a familiar refrain in the 1930’s. If the statement were accepted at face value, then money spent on active (fighters) or passive (shelters) defense was wasted and should be spent on more bombers! (note: without radar, not developed until the late 1930’s, the concept of the bomber always getting through had some validity) Interestingly, in planning just before WWII started, it was assumed that British cities would be bombed and that hospitals would be overwhelmed with casualties – but two of every three ‘casualties’ would be psychiatric, people driven mad by bombing. Its no accident that when war came, Britain was plastered with government posters which said, simply: “Keep Calm, and Carry On”.

10. Friedman, op. cit., p.101. These problems are referenced later in this article

11. Ibid., p.114

12. Royal Navy officers were actively discouraged from ‘ruining their careers’ by becoming pilots.

13. Beaver, P., The British Aircraft Carrier, pp.19-20

14. Ibid., p.15

15. Preston, A., Aircraft Carriers. P.33 In the late 1920’s the accident rate had been as high as 1 in 4 landings, but with few serious accidents. By the 1930’s the rate had improved significantly

16. Friedman, op. cit., p.19. When the British began to develop ‘deck-parks’ as a regular feature of flight operations from 1943 onwards, it was found that the forward rounding had cost significant parking space. The Americans, ignoring ‘ship-shaping’, forced their aircraft designers to produce more rugged aircraft.

17. Robbins, G., The Aircraft Carrier Story, p. 67 Robbins is especially harsh towards the RAF and naval leadership in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He wrote: “In September 1939 the FAA’s aircraft were clearly inferior…. This was the result of 20 years of dual control with the RAF which caused an alarming drift in naval air policy which affected aircraft procurement. The Air Staff gave a very low priority to Naval needs such as torpedo bombers and was actively opposed to dive bombers”. The first British dive bomber was the Blackburn Skua, 1938, and it was recognized as a failure even before it entered its short-lived service. (page 102)

18. Preston, op. cit., p.33

19. Ibid., p.35

20. Hobbes, D., Aircraft Carriers of the Royal and Commonwealth Navies, p.18

21. Friedman, op. cit., p.109

22. Robbins, op. cit., p.77

23. Ibid., pp.80-83

24. The Royal Navy in the 1930’s was organized with a Home Fleet (North Sea-Atlantic meant to counter Germany); a Mediterranean Fleet (Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria, to counter Italy); and a Far Eastern Fleet (to oppose Japan). Robbins, op. cit., p.87

25. Preston, op. cit., p. 70 It would be the ‘jeep’ or escort carrier that would prove to be a useful tool against the submarines, not the large fleet carriers.

26. Idem

27. Ibid., p.72. Only one survivor each from the accompanying destroyers

28. Two American escort carriers were lost to gunfire during the Battle of Leyte Gulf

29. Howland, VW., “The Loss of HMS Glorious: an Analysis of the Action” in Warship International, no.1, 1994, pp.47-62

30. Ibid., p.61

31. Ibid., p.62

32. Glorious RC144-BCGL@ $29.50 USD and Glorious-226 1:384 @ $7.00 USD

33. I believe the article is actually the third chapter in Peter Beisheim’s Building Model Warships of the Iron and Steel Eras but I could be mistaken. Brian King wrote Advanced Ship Modeling and the article might be found here.

34. Fleet Air Arm museum model show in 2009.



Bibliography:

Friedman, Norman, British Carrier Aviation: the Evolution of the Ships and their Aircraft, Conway Maritime Press, 1988

Hobbes, D., Aircraft Carriers of the Royal and Commonwealth Navies, Greenhill Books, 1996

Beaver, Paul, The British Aircraft Carrier, 3rd ed., Patrick Stevens, Ltd., 1987

Howland, V.W., “The Loss of HMS Glorious: an Analysis of the Action” in Warship International, no.1, 1992

Preston, Anthony, Aircraft Carriers, Galahad Books, 1979

Robbins, G., The Aircraft Carrier Story, Cassel & Co., 2001

Ships of the World, History of British Carriers, no. 649, Oct. 2005, ed. T. Kizu, Kaijinsha Co.Ltd



Picture Credits:

Main Picture: Courageous: Royal Navy, public domain

Last Picture: Glorious: Royal Navy, public domain

Picture 1: Profile Publications #24: HMS Furious: Part 2, p.275

Picture 2: Ships of the World, p. 46 Courageous

Picture 3: Furious shown; Royal Navy, public domain

Picture 4: Ships of the World, p.47 Courageous

Picture 5: Royal Navy, public domain Courageous

Picture 6: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious

Picture 7: www.digilander.libero.it

Picture 8: www.digilander.libero.it

Picture 9: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious

Picture 10: www.digilander.libero.it Courageous

Picture 11: Royal Navy, public domain. Courageous

Picture 12: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingbosun Glorious

Picture 13: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious

Picture 14: Profile Publications # 24: HMS Furious: Part 2, p.274

Picture 15: FAA Museum (Swordfish flying over Glorious)

Picture 16: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingbosun Courageous

Picture 17: Royal Navy, public domain

Picture 18: Naval Historical Center NH 101559 Scharnhorst

Picture 19: www.scharnhorst-class.dk/gneisenau

Picture 20: www.hp-models.com

Picture 21: www.hp-models.com

Picture 22: www.modelwarships.com Features 26-02-09

Picture 23: www.modelwarships.com Features 26-02-09

Picture 24: http://picasaweb.google.com/pingbosun Courageous 1932

Picture 25: www.digilander.libero.it Glorious

Picture 26: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious

Picture 27: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious

Picture 28: Royal Navy, public domain Glorious Note on this picture the ‘bridge’ that swings out from the smokestack over the flight deck. It can be seen also in some earlier pictures in this article.

Picture 29: Royal Navy, public domain Courageous

Picture 30: Ships of the World, p. 47 Courageous



 


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  Photos and text © 2011 by Dan Linton

April 3, 2011

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