HMS Glorious: History of a Controversy

On the anniversary of its dramatic sinking, Philip Weir revisits the controversy surrounding the mysterious events of that fateful day. Late in the afternoon of the June 8th, 1940, the Royal Navy suffered one of its most devastating defeats of the Second World War. HMS Glorious, one of Britain's largest and fastest aircraft carriers, was sunk along with her escorting destroyers HMS Ardent and HMS Acasta. The three British warships were taking part in Operation Alphabet, the evacuation of Allied forces from Norway that had been taking place simultaneously with the rather better known and remembered evacuation at Dunkirk. At 0300, Glorious and her escorts detached from Vice Admiral Lionel Wells' aircraft carrier squadron, which was covering the evacuation convoys on their journey back to Britain, and headed home. She had been assigned to evacuate ten biplane Gloster Gladiator fighters of the RAF's 263 Squadron. In a remarkable feat of seamanship and flying, seven Hawker Hurricanes of 46 Squadron also managed to land on her flight deck: something previously thought impossible for high performance monoplanes, unadapted to naval work. At 1545 they were spotted by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. With no aircraft in the air to provide an early warning, and despite a heroic, Victoria Cross-nominated defensive performance by the destroyers, escape proved impossible. By around 1820, the valiant Acasta, last of the British ships still afloat, which had torpedoed Scharnhorst in a last gasp attack, sank, blazing, beneath the waves. Aboard Scharnhorst a film crew recorded the action and Glorious became perhaps the first major Royal Navy ship whose demise was seen in moving pictures, triumphantly displayed to the world only days later on the newsreel 'Die Deutsche Wochenschau'.






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