HMS Ark Royal (91): Royal Navy Aircraft Carrier of WW2

HMS Ark Royal (91) was a one-off design of Royal Navy aircraft carrier, and the third warship to carry the name in honor of the flagship of the English fleet that fought the Spanish Armada in 1588. Laid down on 16 September 1935 at Cammell Laird's Birkenhead yard to fit within the tonnage limits of the Washington Naval Treaty, she was launched on 13 April 1937 and commissioned on 16 December 1938. No sister ship was ever built to her exact plans, though her layout fed directly into the Royal Navy's next generation of carriers, the armored-deck Illustrious class. In under three years of war service she took part in almost every major operation of the early Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns before a single German torpedo sent her to the bottom within sight of Gibraltar.

Design Innovations

Ark Royal broke with the pattern of earlier British carriers, which had typically bolted a flight deck onto a hull originally built for another purpose. On Ark Royal, the flight deck and two enclosed hangar decks were designed as an integral part of the hull structure from the outset, rather than added as a superstructure. The flight deck itself, plated in 19 mm (0.75 in) Ducol steel, doubled as the ship's structural strength deck, the main load-bearing member running the length of the hull, a role normally played by a deck lower down in the hull on other warship types. The enclosed-hangar arrangement gave her a rated capacity of 60 aircraft against a theoretical maximum of 72, a substantial air group for the period and one that let her operate as a genuinely independent strike and reconnaissance asset rather than just a fleet scout. Power came from six Admiralty three-drum boilers feeding three sets of geared turbines on three shafts, rated at 102,000 shaft horsepower; on trials she made just over 31 knots at deep displacement, respectable for a carrier of her size and enough to keep pace with the fast battlecruisers and cruisers she frequently operated alongside. Unlike the Illustrious-class carriers that followed her, Ark Royal had no armored flight deck, relying instead on speed, a large fighter complement and a heavy anti-aircraft battery to protect herself, a design trade-off that gave her more hangar space and a bigger air group at the cost of vulnerability to a sustained air or underwater attack.

Force H and the Mediterranean Lifeline

Force H, formed at Gibraltar in June 1940 after France's surrender, was built around Ark Royal, the battlecruiser HMS Renown and a screen of cruisers and destroyers, and it existed to do the job the French Navy could no longer be relied on to do: control the western Mediterranean and the approaches to the Atlantic. For Ark Royal that meant a punishing routine of convoy escort, aircraft-ferry runs to Malta, and periodic strikes against Italian and French targets, interrupted by the occasional set-piece action like the Bismarck chase. Malta's survival through the darkest months of 1940 and 1941 depended heavily on fighters flown off Ark Royal's deck within range of the island, since flying them directly from Gibraltar was well beyond their range; the carrier would close to within striking distance, launch her cargo of Hurricanes or Spitfires, then turn back for Gibraltar before Italian aircraft or submarines could intervene.

Service, 1938–1941

Ark Royal's war began within days of its outbreak: in September 1939 she joined hunter-killer patrols against German U-boats in the Western Approaches, an early episode of the Battle of the Atlantic that nearly cost her when U-39 attempted an unsuccessful torpedo attack on her that October. From October to December 1939 she helped hunt for the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic, a search that ended with the Graf Spee's scuttling off Montevideo rather than a direct engagement with Ark Royal's own aircraft.

In the spring of 1940 she supported the Norwegian campaign, then in June joined the newly formed Force H at Gibraltar. The following month her aircraft took part in the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, Algeria, and in September she was involved in a second action against French naval forces at Dakar. Through late 1940 she covered convoys running the length of the Mediterranean, and her aircraft struck at Italian shipping and shore targets, including a raid on Genoa harbor in February 1941 during a Royal Navy sortie deep into Italian-controlled waters.

Her best-known moment came in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941. On 26 May 1941, with Bismarck steaming for the safety of occupied France, Ark Royal launched her Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers in appalling weather; one torpedo hit jammed Bismarck's rudder, leaving her unable to steer and unable to outrun the British battleships converging on her. Bismarck was sunk the next morning. Through the rest of 1941 Ark Royal kept ferrying fighter aircraft to the besieged base at Malta and escorting Malta-bound convoys, the routine, unglamorous work that kept the island supplied through the worst of the Mediterranean siege.

The Most "Sunk" Ship in the Royal Navy

Long before U-81 actually caught her, German propaganda had already claimed Ark Royal's destruction on multiple occasions. Radio broadcasts, most famously those of the English-language propagandist William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw"), announced her sinking after several of her early Mediterranean actions, well ahead of the real event. The claims became something of a running joke within the Royal Navy and in the British press, which needled Berlin each time the "sunk" carrier turned up again escorting the next convoy. When Ark Royal finally did go down in November 1941, the German propaganda machine, after crying wolf so many times, reportedly struggled to make the true sinking sound credible to its own domestic audience.

Sinking by U-81, 13–14 November 1941

Returning to Gibraltar from one such Malta operation, Ark Royal was struck by a single torpedo from the German submarine U-81, one of the Type VIIC U-boats that formed the backbone of Karl Dönitz's Atlantic campaign, on 13 November 1941. The torpedo hit amidships and opened flooding that the crew could not control despite hours of damage-control effort; the carrier gradually took on a list, and after a prolonged struggle she capsized and sank early the following morning, 14 November 1941. Remarkably, only one man died in the sinking, Able Seaman Edward Mitchell, out of a wartime complement of roughly 1,600 officers and men, a result credited to the slow pace of the flooding and an orderly evacuation onto escorting destroyers.

Inquiry and Lessons

The loss led to a Board of Inquiry and, afterward, to the court martial of her captain, Loben Maund, who was found guilty of two charges: failing to keep properly constituted damage-control parties aboard after the general evacuation began, and failing to keep the ship in a sufficient state of readiness to deal with battle damage. A subsequent inquiry, the Bucknill Committee, went further and concluded the design itself bore more responsibility than the captain's decisions: Ark Royal had no diesel backup generators and depended entirely on steam-driven dynamos for electrical power, so once the single torpedo hit knocked out steam, the pumps needed to fight the flooding lost power too. Investigators also found that hatches and covers left open during the evacuation let water spread unchecked through an uninterrupted boiler-room space that ran the width of the hull. Those findings fed directly into backup-power and compartmentation standards on later British carriers, an unusually direct case of a single loss reshaping design practice across the fleet.

Discovery of the Wreck

Ark Royal's resting place was confirmed in December 2002, when the survey company C & C Technologies located her using autonomous underwater vehicle sonar roughly 30 nautical miles from Gibraltar, in about 1,000 m (3,300 ft) of water. The wreck lies upright in two main sections and has since been the subject of several deep-water survey dives.

The Later Ark Royals

The name did not retire with the ship. A second HMS Ark Royal (R09), an Audacious-class fleet carrier, served from 1955 until 1979 and operated Buccaneer and Phantom strike aircraft during the Cold War. A third, HMS Ark Royal (R07), was one of three Invincible-class light carriers and served from 1985 to 2011, seeing action off the former Yugoslavia, in Sierra Leone, in the 2003 Iraq invasion and in Libya in 2011 before decommissioning ended the name's run in Royal Navy service, at least for now.