The sinking of HMS Glorious

On the evening of 7 June 1940 the RAF fighters that had spent the previous weeks defending the skies over Narvik landed on the deck of the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, cruising off the coast of northern Norway. The pilots had achieved something nobody had tried before and had saved their aircraft from being abandoned ashore as the land was evacuated. The following afternoon, on an empty, sunlit Norwegian Sea, the carrier and her two escorting destroyers, Ardent and Acasta, ran into the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. In less than two hours all three British ships had gone to the bottom. More than 1,500 sailors, airmen and Royal Marines were killed, and only about forty survived. It was the Royal Navy’s heaviest single loss of the entire Norwegian campaign, and one of the few occasions in history on which an aircraft carrier was sunk by the guns of surface ships.

The date

Some war chronologies place the sinking of Glorious on 7 June. In fact the action was fought on the afternoon of 8 June 1940, as British and German sources agree. 7 June was the day on which the evacuated fighters landed on the carrier and on which a cruiser carrying the Norwegian King sailed from Tromsø – the day, in other words, on which this story begins. Times follow those used in British accounts; the German ships’ logs recorded the same events an hour later.

The evacuation from Narvik

When London decided on 24 May to abandon Norway, the Allies faced a task more difficult than the capture of Narvik itself: to withdraw some 25,000 British, French and Polish troops from northern Norway without the Germans noticing. The evacuation, named Operation Alphabet, lasted from the night of 3–4 June until 8 June. Destroyers took the troops off from around Harstad and the fjords near Narvik and ferried them out to large ocean liners waiting at sea. The convoys sailed for Britain in several groups, covered by ships of the Home Fleet. Air cover was provided by the carriers Ark Royal and Glorious, which had come up from Scapa Flow at the beginning of June.

Glorious was an unusual ship. She had been built during the First World War as a so-called large light cruiser, fast and lightly armoured, and in the 1920s she was converted into an aircraft carrier, like her sister Courageous, sunk by a U-boat in September 1939. She could carry around 48 aircraft and make more than 30 knots. For most of her service she had operated in the Mediterranean, and in April 1940 she was brought north to support the expedition to Norway. She then ferried RAF fighters to Norwegian airfields, including Hurricanes in May, which were hoisted aboard by crane and could take off from her deck only once the ship had worked up to full speed.

In the last weeks of the campaign two RAF squadrons were operating in northern Norway: No. 263, flying obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes, and No. 46, with modern Hawker Hurricanes. From the airfield at Bardufoss they covered Narvik, Harstad and the fleet anchored in the fjords, shooting down several dozen German aircraft. When the decision to evacuate was taken, the plan was to destroy them on the ground, since the Hurricanes had no arrester hooks for deck landing and it was thought they would be unable to pull up on a short flight deck. The commander of No. 46 Squadron, Squadron Leader Kenneth Cross, nevertheless obtained permission to try. The pilots found that a sandbag in the rear fuselage allowed them to brake hard immediately after touching down without the risk of the aircraft tipping onto its nose. On the afternoon of 7 June ten Gladiators of No. 263 Squadron landed on Glorious, and in the evening, without much difficulty, the Hurricanes of No. 46 Squadron. Sources give different numbers of them, from seven to ten. It was the first time in history that modern monoplane fighters without hooks had landed on an aircraft carrier.

A lone passage

In the early hours of 8 June the captain of Glorious, Captain Guy D’Oyly-Hughes, asked for permission to return independently to Scapa Flow, and it was granted. The carrier detached from the main force and steamed south-west with only two destroyers, Ardent and Acasta. The official reason given was a shortage of fuel. According to the historian John Winton and some of the survivors, the real reason was the captain’s quarrel with his own air officer, Commander J. B. Heath, who had earlier refused to send aircraft to attack poorly reconnoitred land targets, considering them unsuitable for his machines. D’Oyly-Hughes had left him at Scapa Flow to await a court martial and, these authors claim, was in a hurry to settle the matter. It has also been suggested that the carrier was to prepare for another task. None of these versions has been conclusively proven.

D’Oyly-Hughes was an experienced officer, but in submarines, not aviation. In the First World War, as first lieutenant of the submarine E11 in the Dardanelles, he had swum ashore at night and blown up a stretch of railway near Constantinople, for which he received the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC). On Glorious he had a reputation as an overbearing commander who disregarded the advice of his aviators. On 8 June the ship was sailing at a low state of readiness. Only 12 of her 18 boilers were under steam, so working up to full speed would take time. No lookout was posted in the crow’s nest. No fighter patrol was flying over the group, although her previous captain had always kept a few aircraft aloft, and the weather was ideal for flying: a cloudless sky and almost unlimited visibility. Besides the RAF machines, the hangar deck held Swordfish and Sea Gladiators of the ship’s own squadrons, a few of which were kept at ten minutes’ readiness.

Operation Juno

The British did not know that the Germans had been in the same waters for several days. On 4 June a force under the Fleet Commander (Flottenchef), Admiral Wilhelm Marschall, had sailed from Kiel: the battleships Gneisenau (flagship) and Scharnhorst, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and four destroyers. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder wanted the fleet to help General Eduard Dietl’s troops, who had been pushed back near Narvik against the Swedish border. The order for Operation Juno provided for a strike on the Allied base at Harstad and support for a German column advancing through Nordland to relieve Dietl. The ships passed unobserved through the Skagerrak and, following the Norwegian coast, reached the Norwegian Sea, where they refuelled from a tanker near the island of Jan Mayen.

On the evening of 7 June Marschall held a conference aboard Gneisenau. Air reconnaissance reported convoys and carriers heading west, but nothing about Harstad. The admiral concluded that the Allies were leaving Norway and decided to hunt for their ships at sea rather than attack an empty base. On the morning of 8 June his ships sank the British tanker Oil Pioneer and her escort, the armed trawler Juniper, and at midday the empty troopship Orama, most of whose crew were taken prisoner. They spared the hospital ship Atlantis, sailing nearby, which for her part did not report the encounter. Marschall then sent Hipper and the destroyers to Trondheim and pressed on northwards with his two battleships. He was acting against the wishes of the high command, which wanted an attack on Harstad, but his radio intelligence was intercepting signals from British carriers and he was hoping for a bigger prize.

The action

At about 3.45 p.m. a lookout on Scharnhorst’s highest platform sighted a smudge of smoke on the horizon, then the top of a mast, at a range of about 46 kilometres. The battleships turned towards it at once. On the British ships the Germans were not spotted until after 4 p.m. Ardent was sent to identify the strange ships. On Glorious neither course nor speed was changed, and action stations were not sounded until 4.20 p.m. An order was given to bring five Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers up to the flight deck, but before they could be readied it was already too late.

At 4.27 p.m. the Germans opened fire on Ardent, which turned away, laying a smokescreen and firing torpedoes. Five minutes later Scharnhorst shifted the fire of her 283 mm guns to the carrier. At 4.38 p.m., at a range of about 24 kilometres, one of her shells hit the forward part of the flight deck and exploded in the upper hangar. It was one of the longest-range hits in the history of naval gunnery. Fire broke out in the hangar, the Swordfish being readied for take-off were destroyed, and the hole in the deck made it impossible to launch any aircraft. At 4.58 p.m. another shell hit the island and killed or wounded the captain and most of the men on the bridge. For some twenty minutes the smoke laid by the destroyers hampered the Germans’ aim, but when it cleared they resumed firing. At about 5.20 p.m. a shell struck the centre engine room. The carrier lost speed, began to circle and to list to starboard. The order was given to abandon ship.

Both destroyers fought to the end in a way that passed into Royal Navy legend. Ardent came out of the smoke again and again to make torpedo attacks, and hit Scharnhorst with a shell from her 120 mm gun. Battered by the secondary armament, she sank at about 5.25 p.m. Acasta, under Commander Charles Glasfurd, which had earlier been screening the carrier with smoke, came out of the screen and headed straight for the battleships. At 5.34 p.m. one of her torpedoes hit Scharnhorst abreast her after main turret. The explosion tore a hole a dozen or more metres long in the hull, some 2,500 tonnes of water flooded in, the turret and one of the engine rooms were put out of action, and nearly fifty German sailors were killed. The shattered Acasta sank at about 6.20 p.m. Glorious went down at about 6.10 p.m.

The survivors

According to survivors’ accounts, about 900 men got into the water from Glorious. The battleships – one of them badly damaged, and neither knowing whether other British ships might be nearby – made off towards Trondheim without picking up survivors. The Royal Navy knew nothing of the disaster. The staffs learned of it the next day from a German radio communiqué. For two or three days the survivors drifted on rafts and in boats in the icy sea, and most of them died of exposure. The Norwegian steamer Borgund, bound for the Faroe Islands, came upon them on the evening of 10 June and brought a few dozen people to Tórshavn, among them the only survivor from Acasta and Kenneth Cross. Another Norwegian vessel, Svalbard II, picked up a few survivors, but after being spotted by a German aircraft she had to turn back to Norway, where those she had rescued were taken prisoner. Two men from Ardent were picked up by a German seaplane. In all, depending on how they are counted, between 38 and 45 people survived.

According to figures based on Winton’s research, 1,519 men were killed or missing: 1,207 from Glorious, 160 from Acasta and 152 from Ardent. Other lists, which include all crew members and passengers lost at sea, give more than 1,530 names. Among the dead were several dozen RAF personnel, including 18 pilots of the two fighter squadrons, who had survived the Norwegian campaign only to die on the way home. Only two pilots of No. 46 Squadron survived, Cross and Flight Lieutenant Patrick Jameson.

The controversy over Glorious

The loss of three ships without a single enemy report became an awkward matter for the Royal Navy, and one that was revisited for decades. Ships were under orders to transmit an enemy report immediately on sighting the enemy. The Admiralty maintained that nothing had been received from Glorious. It soon emerged, however, that the heavy cruiser HMS Devonshire, flagship of Vice-Admiral John H. D. Cunningham, had passed 30 to 50 nautical miles from the scene of the action, carrying King Haakon VII, the Crown Prince and the Norwegian government to Britain. Some of the survivors of Glorious and members of Devonshire’s crew later testified that the cruiser had picked up a garbled report from the carrier. Cunningham was under orders to maintain radio silence and to bring his passengers safely home at all costs, so he did not pass the report on or turn back, but increased speed instead. According to a Norwegian account, he showed the signal to the King, who, on asking what the admiral’s orders were, was told that they were to bring His Majesty safely to England. Haakon later remarked that Cunningham had clearly not liked this. The Vice-Admiral should not be confused with his namesake Andrew Cunningham, then commanding the Mediterranean Fleet.

Critics also pointed to the absence of an air patrol in conditions of perfect visibility, which could have detected the Germans several dozen miles away and given the ships time to escape, to the ship’s low state of readiness, and to the decision to sail alone. Moreover, after the work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, it emerged that analysts in the naval section – among them, according to later accounts, the young Harry Hinsley – had predicted from traffic analysis that German ships were putting to sea, but the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre did not share their assessment and did not warn the fleet. The circumstances of the loss of Glorious were debated in the House of Commons as late as 28 January 1999, and the affair remains controversial to this day.

Its place in the war

The German success came at a price. Scharnhorst, with Acasta’s torpedo in her hull, limped into Trondheim. On 13 June fifteen Blackburn Skua dive bombers from Ark Royal attacked her in harbour, scoring one hit with a bomb that failed to explode, at the cost of eight aircraft. On 20 June, when Gneisenau put to sea to cover her sister’s return home, the British submarine HMS Clyde torpedoed her in the bow. Both battleships remained under repair until the end of 1940. Together with the earlier losses off Norway, this meant that in the summer of 1940, when Adolf Hitler ordered preparations for an invasion of Britain, the Kriegsmarine had almost no operational heavy ships. Although Marschall had won the German fleet’s biggest engagement of the campaign, Raeder criticised him for departing from his orders on his own initiative, and he soon lost his post to Admiral Günther Lütjens.

For the British, the loss of Glorious was a heavy blow at a moment when the whole Allied strategy was collapsing in France. The Royal Navy had lost its second aircraft carrier in nine months of war, and with her airmen who would be sorely missed in the air battle over England. The disaster was also a lesson that the navy absorbed slowly and painfully: a carrier without her own aircraft in the air is defenceless against ships whose guns reach further than her lookouts can see. On the night of 7–8 June the last Allied troops left the Narvik area, and the Allied forces that had won the first land victory over the Wehrmacht there were heading home and to France, which was still fighting. The sinking of Glorious, Ardent and Acasta was the final act of the Norwegian campaign at sea and its bloodiest day for the Royal Navy. It is commemorated by memorials in Portsmouth, Plymouth and in Harstad in Norway, the last unveiled in 2010, on the seventieth anniversary of the action.