British Aircraft Carriers: Design, Development and Service Histories

691 Pages·2016·42.95 MB·English

by  David Hobbs.

BRITISH
AIRCRAFT
CARRIERS

BRITISH
AIRCRAFT
CARRIERS
Design, Development
and Service Histories
DAVID HOBBS
Copyright © David Hobbs 2013
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Seaforth Publishing
An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street, Barnsley
S Yorkshire S70 2AS
www.seaforthpublishing.com
Email [email protected]
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP data record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84832 138 0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both the
copyright owner and the above publisher.
The right of David Hobbs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
Typeset and designed by Neil Sayer
Printed in China through Printworks International Ltd.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Admiralty interest in aviation 1908–1911
Chapter 2: Early ship trials and demonstrations
Chapter 3: Seaplane carriers
Chapter 4: Furious and Vindictive
Chapter 5: Argus
Chapter 6: Eagle
Chapter 7: Hermes
Chapter 8: The development of carriers in other navies
Chapter 9: Courageous class
Chapter 10: Ark Royal
Chapter 11: Illustrious class – first group
Chapter 12: Indomitable
Chapter 13: Implacable group
Chapter 14: British-built escort carriers and MAC-ships
Chapter 15: Archer class
Chapter 16: Attacker class
Chapter 17: Ruler class
Chapter 18: Project Habbakuk
Chapter 19: Audacious class
Chapter 20: Colossus class
Chapter 21: Majestic class
Chapter 22: Malta class
Chapter 23: A comparison with aircraft carriers in other navies
C P : Original plans between 224 and 225
OLOUR LATES
Chapter 24: The maintenance carriers Unicorn, Pioneer and Perseus
Chapter 25: Hermes class
Chapter 26: British carrierborne aircraft and their operation
Chapter 27: Post-1945 aircraft carrier designs that were not built
Chapter 28: The reconstruction – Victorious, Hermes and Eagle
Chapter 29: CVA-01: the unbuilt Queen Elizabeth
Chapter 30: Ark Royal – controversy, a single carrier and her aircraft
Chapter 31: Small carrier designs for a future fleet
Chapter 32: Short take-off and vertical landing
Chapter 33: Invincible class
Chapter 34: Ocean – landing platform (helicopter)
Chapter 35: Queen Elizabeth class
Chapter 36: Aircraft carriers in the Commonwealth navies
Chapter 37: British carrier concepts and foreign aircraft carriers compared
Chapter 38: Carrierborne aircraft in the twenty-first century
Chapter 39: Unmanned aircraft – a fast-moving technical and tactical revolution
Chapter 40: The Royal Navy’s future prospects: the author’s afterwords
APPENDICES
A: Illustrative Royal Navy carrierborne aircraft 1912-2012
B: Examples of aircraft from other services that have operated from RN aircraft carriers
C: The proposed aircraft carrying mail steamer of 1923
D: Fighter catapult ships and CAM-ships
E: British aircraft carrier losses
F: Pennant numbers and deck recognition letters
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has taken me some years to compile and, as always, I have relied on the support of my
wife, Jandy, who encouraged and helped me with both research and collation and on my son Andrew
who maintains his unfailing interest in my writings.
I would like to thank Jeremy Michel and Andrew Choong of the Historic Photographs & Ship
Plans Department of the National Maritime Museum at the Brass Foundry in Woolwich who gave me
access to the many ship's covers and drew my attention to the 'as-fitted' drawings reproduced in this
book. Jennie Wraight, the Admiralty Librarian, has given me valuable assistance over the years as
have Christopher Page, Steven Prince, Jock Gardner, Malcolm Llewellyn-Jones and Mike MacAloon
and, of course, the late David Brown at the Naval Historical Branch. David Stevens, Director of
Strategic and Historical Studies at the Sea Power Centre – Australia gave valuable help and
information about the RAN and John Perryman helped with information and photographs. Joe
Straczek helped with details of RN carrier movements in Australia and the Far East after 1945 and
Terry Hetherington, Manager of the Fleet Air Arm Museum at RANAS Nowra, helped with the search
for photographs. Mark Schweikert also helped me in my search for images. Michael Whitby, Chief of
the Canadian Naval History Team at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa gave information
about the Canadian Fleet Air Arm. I would especially like to thank my friend Norman Friedman for
the insight and understanding of world naval aviation that he has brought to our discussions at
international conferences over the years; I value his opinions and encyclopaedic knowledge greatly.
A book like this requires considerable archival research and I would also like to thank Joe Kelly
and other staff at the National Archives at Kew and the staff at the MOD Records Department who
helped me when it was sited at Hayes. While I was Curator of the Fleet Air Arm Museum at
Yeovilton I was able to carry out research in its extensive archive and I would like to thank staff there
including Jan Keohane, Catherine Cooper, Jerry Shore, the late Len Lovell and the late Dennis White
for their help and support.
I have gathered a large photographic archive of my own over many years and I have used it to
illustrate a number of the carriers in this book but I found that there were significant gaps. Several
people volunteered to help fill this deficiency and among them I would like to thank A D Baker III in
the USA. I am also grateful to Steve Bush in the UK who was able to add images from the Ferrers-
Walker collection to his own and make them available. My friends at the Crail Museum, Sue
Bradman and Anne Mayes were also most helpful in providing images from the Museum archive.
John Jordan and Ian Sturton helped with drawings at short notice and Conrad Waters also provided
me with assistance. I have used a number of images which were made available by the US Navy and
the Royal Australian Navy.
This publication contains Public Sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence
v 1.0 in the UK.
Numerous other people have helped over the past few years by contributing data on equipment,
tactics and technique that helped to shape the book; they are too numerous to name but I thank them
all. Any errors that come to light are, however, my own responsibility. As always, I am grateful to
Rob Gardiner and Seaforth Publishing for giving me the opportunity to publish this book which is the
result of many years of research.
David Hobbs
INTRODUCTION
This book describes the development of aircraft carriers by the Royal Navy, from the first
experiments in 1911 with aircraft that could operate from ships to the present day. It includes the
early experimental vessels to show the line of development, and goes on to include all those ships
which had the operation of aircraft as their primary purpose. It does not include battleships, cruisers,
destroyers, frigates and fleet auxiliaries, many of which operated small numbers of aircraft as one
among many purposes throughout the same period. The dividing line can become blurred, however,
and details of fighter catapult ships are included, together with MAC-Ships, although the operation of
aircraft from the latter was arguably secondary to their primary purpose as grain ships or tankers. I
considered it important that they could be compared with British-built escort carriers.
With the exception of the Invincible and Queen Elizabeth classes and the commando helicopter
carrier Ocean, all the ships covered were designed and built to Imperial measurements, and I have
used these throughout to avoid the possibility of errors in translation. That said, I have used Imperial
units for the three classes mentioned above so that they can more easily be compared with the earlier
vessels, and to give a consistent form of measurement throughout. Where distances are referred to in
miles, they are nautical miles, which are an exact distance of 6,080ft but usually taken as being 2,000
yards in any but the most precise navigational calculation. Gallons are given in Imperial measure, and
American readers should note that one US gallon is the equivalent of 0.833 Imperial gallons.
The book is divided into chapters which contain details of British aircraft carriers by class,
comparisons with foreign carriers at various stages of development, and descriptions of naval aircraft
and their impact on ship design. After the Second World War the Australian, Canadian and, to an
extent, Indian navies worked in close concert with the RN from which they had evolved and operated
aircraft carriers of British design and construction that were either purchased outright or lent from the
United Kingdom. They are, therefore, included in the chapters with their RN sister ships. Later ships
have been purchased from other nations, operate less intimately with the RN and have therefore been
allocated a chapter of their own. Each chapter covering an aircraft carrier class has a technical
description of the design, drawings, photographs and an individual history of every ship in the class.
Unlike my previous books, in this one I have not used endnotes. In an encyclopædic work of this
nature virtually every sentence would have required an endnote giving the source or some other
amplification, and this would have proved impossible. The extensive bibliography gives sources and
references for the data, facts and figures I have used, which were sourced both from published and
unpublished documents. Amplification, where necessary, has been worked into the text, and I am
responsible for any errors or omissions.
As I worked my way chronologically through the various aircraft carrier classes I found that some
ships did not fit easily into this format because of long gestation periods or a massive mid-life
reconstruction. I have therefore split them, and Victorious, Eagle, Hermes and Ark Royal have their
initial design and early history described in their sister-ships’ chapters but their reconstruction and
later histories described in chapters of their own. To have done otherwise would have put the latter
part of their service with steam catapults and transonic fighters in the same chapter as ships operating
Swordfish and Seafires and would have been illogical. Effectively these ships had two distinct lives,
and the list of contents and index will clarify any doubts the reader might have. As I made way