The sinking of the Ark Royal

On the afternoon of 13 November 1941, a few dozen nautical miles east of Gibraltar, the German submarine U-81 under Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Guggenberger torpedoed the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal. The ship was returning with Force H from Operation Perpetual, in which she had flown off fighters to Malta the day before. One torpedo was enough. For more than fourteen hours the crew and tugs tried to bring the ship into port, but early on the morning of 14 November Ark Royal capsized and sank, only about 30 nautical miles from Gibraltar. Only one sailor was killed. The loss of Britain’s most famous aircraft carrier, which had come through two years of war and earned a reputation as a “lucky ship”, was a heavy blow to the Royal Navy, and the manner of her loss became the subject of an inquiry.

War chronologies connect two items of news with these days: under 12 November they record that Ark Royal delivered a squadron of Hurricanes to Malta, and under 13 November that she was torpedoed by U-81 and sank the following day. Both are essentially accurate; it need only be added that the fighters were flown off by two carriers, Ark Royal and Argus, and that there were more than a single squadron of them.

A ship that had luck

Ark Royal, built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and commissioned at the end of 1938, was the first British ship in which the flight deck and the two hangar decks formed an integral part of the hull rather than a superstructure. She displaced some 22,000 tons, could make more than 30 knots and carried several dozen aircraft, chiefly Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers and Skua fighters, later Fulmars.

From the first days of the war she was at the centre of events. On 14 September 1939 U-39 missed her with its torpedoes west of the Hebrides and was itself sunk by the escorting destroyers. A few weeks later German propaganda announced that Ark Royal had been sunk by aircraft, although the bomb had fallen into the sea alongside. In the autumn of 1939 the carrier hunted the Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic, and in the spring of 1940 she covered Allied troops in Norway. From June 1940 she was based at Gibraltar with Vice Admiral James Somerville’s Force H. Her aircraft spotted for the ships’ guns during the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, attacked Italian airfields in Sardinia and the port of Genoa, and in May 1941 her Swordfish jammed the Bismarck’s rudders, sealing the fate of the German battleship.

Most often, however, Ark Royal sailed with fighters for Malta. In 1941, together with other carriers, she several times ferried Hurricanes into the western Mediterranean, from where they took off from her deck and flew on to the island under their own power – in April, in June’s Operation Rocket and on later runs – and in the summer and autumn she covered the large Substance and Halberd convoys. These runs enabled Malta to defend itself and to attack the Axis supply routes to Libya. During this time the ship survived dozens of air attacks without serious damage, which fed the legend of her luck.

Operation Perpetual

At the beginning of November Malta again needed fighters. Force K, which had been operating from the island against Axis convoys since 21 October, had destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy on the night of 8–9 November, and the British expected the Germans and Italians to retaliate with air raids. On 10 November Ark Royal and the old, small carrier Argus left Gibraltar with fighters on board. They were covered by the battleship Malaya, the cruiser Hermione and destroyers. The ships, under Somerville’s command, sailed east along the North African coast as far as the aircraft’s range allowed.

On 12 November 37 Hurricanes took off from the two carriers. According to British tallies, 34 reached Malta. At the same time seven Bristol Blenheim bombers flew to the island directly from Gibraltar. Having flown off the aircraft, Force H turned back for base. It was one of many so-called “Club Runs”, in which from 1940 to 1942 carriers ferried fighters for Malta to within flying range of the island.

A torpedo off Gibraltar

The British knew that German U-boats were forcing their way into the Mediterranean. At the end of August 1941 Hitler, against the views of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder and the commander of the U-boat arm, Karl Dönitz, who did not want to weaken the Battle of the Atlantic, ordered U-boats to be sent to help the Italians and Rommel. A first group of six boats slipped through the Strait of Gibraltar by night from the end of September. In November a second followed. Among them was Guggenberger’s U-81, which already had two ships sunk in the North Atlantic to its credit. At the end of October, on its first attempt to pass the strait, it had been badly damaged by British aircraft and forced to return to Brest. On 4 November it sailed again and this time got through the strait. According to accounts of its history, it received a report that Force H was returning to Gibraltar and moved out to intercept it.

Somerville had warned his ships of submarines off the Spanish coast. On the afternoon of 13 November, with a few dozen miles left to Gibraltar, Guggenberger, according to German records, fired a spread of four torpedoes at long range at the battleship Malaya. At about 3.40 p.m. British time (4.37 p.m. German time) one of them struck Ark Royal, sailing nearby, on the starboard side beneath the island, between the fuel tanks and the bomb room. The explosion tore a hole several dozen metres long in the bottom and side, threw the aircraft on deck into the air and killed a sailor, Edward Mitchell. He was the only fatal casualty of the sinking. The escorting destroyers depth-charged U-81 for many hours – some accounts count about 130 depth charges – but the boat escaped and on 1 December entered La Spezia.

Fourteen hours’ struggle for the ship

Water flooded the starboard boiler room, the main switchboard and the fuel tanks. Internal communications and power in the after part of the ship were cut. The captain, Captain Loben Maund, ordered the engines stopped, but because communications had failed the order had to be carried to the engine room by a messenger, and the ship, still moving ahead, took in water through her torn hull. Within twenty minutes the list had reached 18 degrees. Maund remembered how quickly, and with what heavy loss of life, the carriers Courageous in 1939 and Glorious in 1940 had sunk, and he ordered the ship abandoned. The destroyer Legion came alongside and took off most of the crew of almost one and a half thousand men. The damage-control parties that were to save the ship were organised only after about three-quarters of an hour, and in the meantime water spread through hatches and scuttles left open.

The list briefly stabilised. Somerville, determined to save the carrier, sent damage-control parties back aboard and himself sailed in Malaya to Gibraltar to organise help. The sailors managed to light one boiler and start the pumps, the destroyer Laforey came alongside to supply power and additional pumps, and Swordfish from Gibraltar circled overhead, watching for submarines. In the evening the tugs Thames and St. Day arrived and took Ark Royal in tow. The ship, however, had no emergency diesel generators, and water reached the boiler uptakes and the boiler-room fan space running across the full width of the ship, forcing the boiler to be shut down. Without power the pumps stopped. The list increased. At four in the morning the order to abandon ship was given again, and the last men went across to Legion at about 4.30 a.m.

Early on 14 November, at 6.19 a.m. according to British records, Ark Royal rolled over onto her starboard side, lay on her beam ends for a few minutes, then turned turtle, broke in two and sank. She was some 25–30 nautical miles from Gibraltar. 1,487 officers and men were landed ashore.

The inquiry

The Admiralty wanted to know how a ship that had stayed afloat for fourteen hours and was so close to her base could have been sunk by a single torpedo. The board of inquiry found that the crew had been evacuated too hastily, leaving too few men to fight for the ship. In 1942 Maund faced a court martial and was found guilty of negligence: he had failed to ensure that properly organised damage-control parties remained on board and had not prepared the ship adequately for damage. The court noted, however, that a great deal had been expected of him and that he had been guided by concern for the lives of his men.

A special committee investigating the loss of major warships pointed in turn to design faults: the lack of standby sources of power independent of the boilers, the layout of the boiler uptakes, and the undivided fan space through which water flooded one boiler room after another. These were corrected in the carriers then under construction. The wreck was found only in December 2002, on behalf of the BBC, at a depth of about a thousand metres and further east than had been thought; its examination strengthened the view that the ship’s fate had been decided by design flaws rather than by her captain’s decisions.

Place in the war

The sinking of Ark Royal heralded a new chapter of the war in the Mediterranean. For a year and a half the Royal Navy’s main opponents there had been the Italian fleet and the Italian and German air forces. Now they were joined by German U-boats whose crews brought experience from the Atlantic. Less than two weeks later U-331 sank the battleship Barham off the Egyptian coast, and in December U-557 sank the cruiser Galatea. On 10 December 1941 Guggenberger was awarded the Knight’s Cross.

For Force H the loss was severe: it was left without a large carrier, and in the months that followed the fighters for Malta were to be carried by Argus, Eagle and, in the spring of 1942, also by the American Wasp. The last attempt in 1941 to get supplies through to Malta from the west, Operation Astrologer in mid-November, in which two lone freighters posed as neutral ships, ended with both sunk by Italian aircraft. For many months Malta could rely only on fighters delivered by carriers, on fast minelayers and on submarines. In Britain the name Ark Royal was given to later aircraft carriers, and the memory of the ship of 1941 remained one of the most vivid legends of the Royal Navy.