HMS Courageous

1939

U-29, fifteen minutes, the first RN carrier Location: Atlantic Ocean, SW of Ireland · Coordinates: 50.17°N 14.80°W · Casualties: 519 · Survivors: 697 · Depth: 140 m · Cause: submarine torpedo — Torpedoed by German submarine U-29 (Otto Schuhart, commanding) southwest of Ireland at 19:50 on 17 September 1939. Two torpedoes struck her port side amidships. She sank in fifteen minutes. · Fate: war grave · protected · Type: aircraft carrier · Courageous class · Tonnage: 22,500 tons · Crew: 1216 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1916 Royal Navy aircraft carrier, converted from a Great War battlecruiser. Torpedoed by U-29 southwest of Ireland at 19:50 on 17 September 1939, two weeks after the war began; she sank in fifteen minutes. 519 dead of 1,216 aboard, the first major Royal Navy loss of the Second World War. The pattern confirmed what the Admiralty feared: the aircraft carrier, without destroyer screens, was a torpedo's natural prey. The Vessel HMS Courageous was a Courageous-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy, converted in 1924-1928 from the cancelled "large light cruiser" of the same name. Like her sister Glorious, she had been one of Lord Fisher's 1915 "Baltic Project" vessels, designed for a war strategy that never materialised, completed after the First World War with a limited operational function, and eventually rebuilt as an aircraft carrier under the 1920s experimentation that converted several larger Royal Navy hulls to carrier service. As reconstructed she was 238 metres long, 22,500 tons, and carried 48 aircraft (typically a mix of Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers and Blackburn Skua fighter-bombers). Her design speed was 30 knots on four-shaft Parsons turbines. Her hangar and flight deck configuration was characteristic of British 1920s carrier conversions: the lower hangar was enclosed and armoured; the upper hangar was open to the weather; the flight deck was planked with narrow-laid Baltic fir. Her interwar service had been predominantly in the Mediterranean Fleet and the Home Fleet, with periodic deployments to the Far East. Her commanding officer in September 1939 was Captain W. T. Makeig-Jones, 52 years old, a career Royal Navy officer with prior carrier service in the 1930s. Her air group was the 811 and 822 Naval Air Squadrons, a composite of Swordfish and Nimrod aircraft. The Disaster Schuhart manoeuvred U-29 to a firing position on Courageous's starboard side. At 19:50 on 17 September 1939 he fired a three-torpedo spread from his forward tubes at a range of 900 metres. Two of the three torpedoes struck Courageous on her starboard side: one at her forward boiler room, one amidships at her engine room. The damage was immediately catastrophic. The two torpedo hits breached her main machinery spaces; her electrical power failed; her damage-control pumps were inoperable. She listed 10 degrees to starboard within 90 seconds and continued listing through the following 12 minutes. Courageous capsized at approximately 20:02 on 17 September 1939, some twelve minutes after the torpedo strike. She sank at 20:07 at approximately 50°10′N 14°45′W in approximately 140 metres of water. Her speed of loss was extraordinary: a 22,500-ton aircraft carrier lost to a single submarine attack in fifteen minutes. Captain Makeig-Jones was on her bridge at the moment of the capsize; he remained aboard and drowned in the bridge as she went over. Of her 1,216 crew, 519 died. 697 were rescued by the escorting destroyers HMS Ivanhoe and HMS Impulsive and by the Dutch merchant ship Veendam, which had been nearby. Courageous was the first Royal Navy fleet carrier lost in the Second World War and the first British capital ship lost to enemy action in the war.