Golden Journal No. 45:
Fleet Air Arm
Britain’s Light Fleet Carriers
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2022

Two years of war at sea taught the Royal Navy and its Fleet Air Arm an indelible lesson: it needed more fighters at sea, and those fighters needed to be better aircraft. Expedients like putting floatplane fighters on battleships, or launching disposable single fighter planes off merchant ships, didn’t fill the need. And escort carriers could not keep up with the battle fleet. After the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya in December 1941, the need for fighter cover became imperative.

The requirements for a new “fighter carrier” went to the Director of Naval Construction less than a month after the Malaya disaster. This ship would be less capable than a fleet carrier, expected to operate only fighters and thus not requiring the magazines and workshops for bombs and torpedoes. It need not be as fast as a fleet carrier, but more than two years of war had shown that fleet carriers rarely needed their top speed.

After making some early sketches and receiving feedback from the Admiralty, the DNC passed the task to naval architect J.S. Redshaw at the private firm of Vickers. The new ship would need to be built quickly in yards with little or no experience building large warships, which meant constructing her to mercantile rather than warship standards. She would be a disposable warship, intended to be scrapped after three years or the end of the war.

Redshaw drafted a ship based loosely on the Illustrious class fleet carriers. She would be somewhat smaller: 695 feet long with a beam of 112 feet six inches for the new ship, compared to 740 feet long with a beam of 92 feet nine inches for Illustrious. But given her lighter structure, the “fighter carrier,” soon re-named the Light Fleet Carrier, would displace just 18,000 tons compared to 28,000 tons for Illustrious. Her hangar deck would meet the latest size requirements – hangar height was already becoming a problem with the fleet carriers – and she would carry twice as much aviation fuel as the fleet carriers. Though initially intended to operate only fighters, the design received bomb rooms and torpedo magazines (with the ship’s only armor protection).

HMS Vengeance runs trials, 1945.

The design moved quickly through the normally convoluted bureaucratic process; given the great need for more carriers capable of serving with the fleet, the usual committees and office-holders stuck their fingers into the soup far less than was usual for a major shipbuilding program. Part of that smooth progress likely came from the sheer size of the program: one light fleet carrier would be laid down on every slipway in the United Kingdom currently available and capable of building such a ship. The shipbuilding conglomerates thus had no incentive to steer work toward their yards; they would all get as much work as they could handle.

From the issuance of requirements in January the program proceeded to the placement of orders for the first three carriers in March 1942, an astonishingly short period. Another ten were ordered on 7 August 1942, and three more in October. Ten carriers were laid down between June 1942 and June 1943 to what became known as the “1942 Design Light Fleet Carrier” and later the Colossus class. The remaining six, known as the Majestic class, were built to a modified design with a strengthened flight deck and larger elevators to allow for the ever-greater size of post-war jet aircraft.

With a deck park, the new carrier could operate 42 aircraft, including all of the types then flown by the Fleet Air Arm. An Illustrious-class carrier, with a deck park, could operate 54 but only if some types were modified to fit under the lower hangar ceilings of the bigger ship. The Light Fleet Carrier cost £2.5 million at 1942’s inflated wartime prices, compared to £3.8 million for Illustrious when ordered in January 1937.

The Light Fleet Carrier design retain the British practice of keeping the hangar enclosed to keep explosive vapors from seeping into the rest of the ship (American carrier hangars were open on either side, to encourage ventilation of those same deadly gases). Where they differed radically was to do away with the armored “box” of the fleet carriers, consisted of the hangar deck, sides and flight deck. While the armored deck could and did cause enemy bombs to bounce off, when one penetrated it could do enormous damage to the ship’s integrity, as the armored hangar was part of the ship’s structure.

HMS Glory enters Malta's Grand Harbour, 1954.

The Light Fleet Carrier had no defensive armament beyond close-range light weapons (2-pounder pom-poms and 40mm Bofors mounts), and limited internal subdivision. Machinery was half of the four-shaft suite ordered for the new Minotaur-class light cruisers then beginning construction; the turbines, boilers and drive shafts ordered for the cancelled Bellerophon went to the first two carriers. Two boilers and a turbine were placed in each of two widely separated engine rooms, with a water-filled space between them. This arrangement, Redshaw hoped, would allow one unit to continue operating in case of a torpedo hit. The ships could make 25 knots, much less than the fleet carriers’ 30 knots, but they had an endurance of 8,300 nautical miles compared to just 6,300 for the bigger ships. Not every change signaled an improvement: quarters were cramped, sailors slept in hammocks rather than the steel-tube bunks of other warships.

Of the original ten ships, four – Colossus, Glory, Venerable and Vengeance - commissioned in time to form Aircraft Carrier Squadron 11 and set out for the Far East to join the British Pacific Fleet. A fifth ship, Ocean, completed just before the end of the war and did not make it to the Pacific. Two ships would be completed as maintenance carriers (Perseus and Pioneer), while Triumph and Theseus completed in 1946. The final ship, Warrior, finished her work-up in 1946 as well but was sold and commissioned directly into the Royal Canadian Navy.

The ships sent out to the British Pacific Fleet carried an air group of 21 Corsair fighters and 18 Barracuda torpedo bombers. They did not arrive in time to see any combat, but did provide air cover to the British and Allied troops accepting the surrender of Japanese forces at various points in formerly Japanese-controlled areas.

Of the six Majestic-class carriers, none would serve in the Royal Navy. One would be laid up incomplete, used as a barracks ship and eventually scrapped, while the other five were sold to Commonwealth navies (and some would be sold on to still other users).

Even at sea, it was a cold first winter in Korea. Sea Furies (foreground) and Fireflies (background) aboard HMS Theseus, 1950. Note skittle about to toss a snowball.

Redshaw’s carriers, intended to last just three years, instead proved one of the soundest designs of any warship class. The Admiralty’s procurement system, pressed to perform for once without petty bureaucratic infighting, delivered. The ships served on for decades, though none saw much service in the Royal Navy. The Colossus-class carrier Vengeance steamed under the Brazilian flag for 41 years as Minas Gerais (following turns with the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy), finally retiring in 2001. The Majestic-class ship Hercules remaining in front-line service with the Indian Navy until 1997, 36 years after she had been commissioned.

Part of that longevity has to be due to simple good luck – none of the nine ships that saw substantial use as front-line aircraft carriers ever faced serious damage from enemy action. But many of them saw hard use, even after spending years or even decades incomplete or laid up. Redshaw had produced a fine ship at low cost.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published zillions of books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his dog Leopold, who is a good dog.

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