HMS Ark Royal

1941

Gibraltar, fourteen hours to sink, damage control blamed Location: Mediterranean, 30 nmi east of Gibraltar · Coordinates: 35.93°N 4.67°W · Casualties: 1 · Survivors: 1,487 · Depth: 1,000 m · Cause: submarine torpedo — Torpedoed by the German submarine U-81 (Friedrich Guggenberger, commanding) thirty miles east of Gibraltar at 15:41 on 13 November 1941. A single torpedo struck her starboard side. She took fourteen hours to sink; a subsequent inquiry blamed inadequate damage control rather than the torpedo itself. · Fate: located 2002 · Type: aircraft carrier · Tonnage: 22,000 tons · Crew: 1488 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1937 Royal Navy aircraft carrier, veteran of the hunt for Bismarck six months earlier. Torpedoed by U-81 thirty miles east of Gibraltar at 15:41 on 13 November 1941. She took 14 hours to sink, long enough for all but one of her 1,488 crew to be taken off. The Admiralty blamed inadequate damage control rather than the torpedo itself; the wreck was found in 2002 at 1,000 metres. The Vessel HMS Ark Royal (91) was a fleet aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy, commissioned at Cammell Laird's Birkenhead yard on 16 November 1938. She was 209 metres long, 22,000 tons standard displacement, and carried an air group of 54-72 aircraft depending on configuration. She had been designed from the outset as a purpose-built aircraft carrier, not a converted battleship or battlecruiser hull; her hull form, hangar arrangement, and flight deck were the product of the Royal Navy's accumulated carrier experience of the 1920s and 1930s. Her design was the most advanced British carrier architecture of the interwar period: twin hangars (one armoured, one not), three aircraft elevators, an armoured flight deck over the hangars, and a starboard-side island superstructure of conventional type. Her designed speed was 31 knots on three shafts; her air group could include Fairey Fulmar fighters, Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, and (from 1940) Fairey Albacore and Fairey Barracuda strike aircraft. She became, in the popular press of Britain between 1939 and 1941, the most famous single ship of the Royal Navy. Her "sinking" was claimed repeatedly by German propaganda (most notably by the comedian William Joyce, "Lord Haw-Haw", on the German radio propaganda broadcasts of 1940), and her continued survival was used in the British press as evidence of the unreliability of German claims. Her commanding officer from December 1940 was Captain Loben Maund, 53 years old, a career Royal Navy officer. The Disaster Guggenberger manoeuvred U-81 to a firing position on Ark Royal's starboard side. At 15:41 he fired a single G7e torpedo from his forward tube at a range of approximately 2,500 metres. The torpedo struck Ark Royal on her starboard side below the waterline, at Frame 144, between her central and aft boiler rooms. The torpedo hit produced an initial breach of approximately 45 metres in her starboard side. The flooding that followed was, however, slower than might have been predicted from the damage: her damage-control teams contained the immediate inflow to the three adjacent boiler rooms, and her stability at 10 degrees of list was within her design envelope. The ship was not in immediate danger of capsizing. The subsequent 14 hours, however, revealed the cumulative effect of damage-control failures on a large aircraft carrier. Her starboard boiler rooms could not be kept operational against the flooding; her electrical power progressively failed as the flooded compartments affected the switchboards; her damage-control pumps ran out of fuel oil as the auxiliary machinery sequentially failed. At 04:30 on 14 November 1941 the damage-control battle was progressively being lost. The captain ordered abandon-ship at 06:00. HMS Ark Royal capsized at 06:19 on 14 November 1941 and sank at 06:40 at approximately 36°03′N 4°40′W in approximately 1,000 metres of water. She had taken 14 hours to sink after the single torpedo strike. Of her 1,488 crew, only one man died: Able Seaman Edward Mit