Aircraft Carriers of the Royal Navy:: The First Hundred Years Paperback – October 1, 2025

Aircraft Carriers of the Royal Navy: The First Hundred YearsPrinted in full ColourREVISED 24 November 2025 - Added HMS Vindictive, Corrected HMS Glorious, colorized some black & white pix.As this book shows, the Royal Navy (RN) developed several important aircraft carriers in the early twentieth century. RN aviation’s first tentative steps actually began in the late nineteenth century. Initial experiments with steamships supporting seaplane operations progressed to converting existing vessels so wheeled aircraft could launch from makeshift ramps built on the forecastle. Those efforts evolved into the first designs that resemble modern aircraft carriers. World War I accelerated the development of many innovations in the field—many of which were quickly adopted by American and Japanese planners and shipbuilders. I include a few notable seaplane carriers as well, such as HMS Ben-my-chree, whose aircraft carried out the first successful ship-launched aerial torpedo attack on an enemy vessel in August 1915. It was also the first aircraft carrier sunk by enemy action.While similar in some respects, RN and U.S. Navy (USN) carriers differed in important ways. USN ships generally had much greater operational range than their RN counterparts. Both navies wanted global reach, but the RN depended on an extensive network of bases for refueling. That system worked well in European waters, was more limited in the Atlantic, and became a major constraint in the Pacific by 1945. The USN emphasized larger fuel capacity aboard individual ships and invested heavily in underway replenishment. One key reason the Washington Naval Treaty defined standard displacement as full load minus fuel and reserve feed water was the U.S. insistence on excluding fuel from the measurement. After World War II, both navies borrowed design ideas from one another for their postwar carriers, seeking a balance between armor protection and air wing size.At the time of the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), the U.S. had only one aircraft carrier, the Langley. The Royal Navy’s early carriers included the Argus (small and slow), the converted battleship Eagle, the purpose-built Hermes (designed only to be modestly faster than the battle line, so also relatively small and slow), and the Furious (a converted large light cruiser—fast, lightly armored, and carrying a few large guns). Remember that when Britain entered the war in September 1939 it had more carriers than any other nation at that moment: Argus, Eagle, Hermes, Furious, Courageous, Glorious, and Ark Royal. Six more carriers were already under construction in British yards, and by the end of the war another 26 carriers had been laid down in Britain.The Ark Royal was broadly comparable to U.S. carriers such as Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet. A major design difference was the flight deck: British carriers used armored flight decks while early American designs did not. Lacking armored decks allowed the U.S. to build carriers more quickly. The United States entered the war in 1941 with eight carriers and finished with seventy. Britain began with seven carriers and ended with eighteen. The trade-off was survivability: armored decks limited damage a ship could sustain. After being returned to British control, HMS Victorious was at Okinawa and took four direct kamikaze hits; by contrast, the USS Enterprise had been struck by a kamikaze earlier and was out of action for six months, while Victorious was out for only three hours. Perhaps the best-known incident was the attack on Illustrious: on 10 January 1941, two Gruppen of Stukas (about 72 aircraft) bombed her and scored six direct hits; Fulmar fighters shot down eight attackers, and Illustrious managed to steam to Malta under her own power. Read more