The Record
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 Voyage
HMS Ark Royal's 1939-1941 service included the hunt for the Graf Spee in the South Atlantic, the Norwegian campaign, the Mediterranean campaigns of 1940-1941, the destruction of the Bismarck (her Swordfish having delivered the torpedo that jammed Bismarck's rudder on 26 May 1941), and the continuous aerial support of Malta through the summer of 1941. By November 1941 she had accumulated an operational record more extensive than any other Royal Navy carrier of the war and had become the symbol, both domestically and internationally, of British naval aviation.
On 13 November 1941 she was returning to Gibraltar after delivering reinforcement aircraft to Malta as part of Operation Perpetual. Her force included HMS Malaya (battleship), HMS Argus (aircraft carrier), seven destroyers, and the oiler Brown Ranger. The force was proceeding eastward at 16 knots in calm weather, approximately 50 nautical miles east of Gibraltar.
The German submarine U-81, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Guggenberger, had been patrolling the eastern Mediterranean approaches to Gibraltar since 10 November 1941. Guggenberger sighted the British force through his periscope at 15:12 on 13 November 1941 at a range of approximately 4,000 metres. He identified Ark Royal immediately; she was unmistakable.
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 Mitchell, killed in the initial torpedo blast. 1,487 survived, a casualty ratio that made her one of the most successful Royal Navy abandonments of the war.
The Legacy
The post-sinking Board of Inquiry, held at Gibraltar in December 1941, produced one of the most extensive damage-control critiques in Royal Navy history. The inquiry's finding was that Ark Royal had been sunk not by the German torpedo but by the progressive failure of her own damage-control systems over 14 hours. The specific deficiencies identified included inadequate sub-subdivision of her machinery spaces, inadequate emergency power redundancy, insufficient fire-main cross-connections, and inadequate crew training for progressive-flooding scenarios. The inquiry recommended substantial revisions to Royal Navy carrier damage-control doctrine.
The subsequent Illustrious-class carriers were substantially modified to incorporate the Ark Royal lessons: better damage-control redundancy, improved machinery space subdivision, and dedicated damage-control training for every carrier crew. The Ark Royal inquiry findings became required reading for every Royal Navy carrier officer through the remainder of the war.
The German Kapitänleutnant Guggenberger was awarded the Knight's Cross for the Ark Royal kill and was promoted. He survived the war, was imprisoned in the United States as a prisoner of war through 1945-46, and after the war joined the West German navy, eventually rising to Admiral. He died in 1988.
The wreck of HMS Ark Royal (91) was located on 5 December 2002 by Innes McCartney, a British marine archaeologist, at a depth of 1,000 metres in the Mediterranean, 55 kilometres east of Gibraltar. The wreck lies on her starboard side; the torpedo impact damage is clearly visible. McCartney's subsequent surveys have documented the complete loss condition of the hull and have, through comparison with the 1941 damage-control reports, confirmed most of the Board of Inquiry's findings about the cumulative failures that followed the initial torpedo strike.
The name HMS Ark Royal has been carried by five successive Royal Navy warships since 1586: the galleon of 1587 that fought the Spanish Armada; the Elizabethan-rebuild Anne Royal of 1608; the First World War seaplane carrier Ark Royal (1914); the Second World War carrier of this folio; and the modern CVR HMS Ark Royal (R07), commissioned in 1985 and decommissioned in 2011. The name is currently in reserve for a future Royal Navy capital ship. The Ark Royal line is the oldest continuous name-line in the Royal Navy. The single crew member who died on the 1941 Ark Royal, Able Seaman Mitchell, is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial alongside the crews of the previous Ark Royals.