Ark Royal: The Engineering Genius Behind WWII's Greatest Aircraft Carrier

Extraordinary, iconic, lethal. These incredible ships have told our story for the past 400 years and defined what it means to be part of our island nation. I'm Rob Bell and in this series I'll be exploring Britain's greatest ships. In this episode, I discover the story of aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal. At the time, the most expensive ship the Royal Navy had ever built. Ark Royal took on both the Luftwaffe and the German Navy. To become the ship the Nazis were most afraid of, the ship that Hitler was determined to sink. Ark Royal would change the face of naval warfare forever. The aircraft carrier is the ultimate symbol of naval power. These giants of the sea dwarf all other ships and have played a major role in every theatre of war since their introduction. One ship opened the world's eyes to the effectiveness of the aircraft carrier, seeing off the might of the German Navy and winning a place in the nation's hearts. HMS Ark Royal. Ark Royal set the blueprint for every aircraft carrier in the world. Even this, HMS Prince of Wales, the most modern ship in the British fleet, is still following in her footsteps. But perfecting the design of Ark Royal would be a battle in itself. The main problem with aircraft carriers is how to get a plane up into the air, off a short runway, at sea. One of the first answers almost beggars belief. And this was the Royal Navy's solution. A 58 feet long, specially designed barge from which the pilots would have to take off. Let's just put that into perspective. Today, most airports have runways over 9,000 feet long. And admittedly, that's to accommodate jumbo jets and the like. But even the shortest runways in the UK are over 800 feet in length. So how was a plane supposed to take off in such a short distance? Well, the Royal Navy had a plan. Each plane would be strapped to a barge, which was towed behind a ship. As the pilots started the engine, the crew held the plane back. When the ship was going fast enough into the wind to add lift, they'd simply let the plane go. This wasn't an exact science, and it was incredibly dangerous. The pilots still only had less than the length of a train carriage to get the plane up into the air. I mean, at just 50 feet, I can walk the length of this deck in, what, 10 seconds? Can you just imagine being the pilot with this as your view? Knowing that if you didn't get the plane up successfully, you'd roll off the front, drop into the sea, and then be crushed by the barge itself. Every pilot's nightmare. Incredibly, this daring technique proved successful. Even in the First World War, British ships could launch planes to attack targets well beyond their normal range. If taking off was difficult, landing on a ship was thought to be impossible. But one brave pilot, Edwin Harris Dunning, would try. Dunning knew full well that this was an incredibly dangerous manoeuvre. But he had a plan. He would fly alongside the central bridge, trying to match the speed of the ship as best he could. And then, at the last minute, he'd swoop down and land on the short runway in front. He was the first man to successfully land a plane on a moving ship. But five days later, as he attempted to perform his incredible stunt for a third time, an updraft caught the wing and the plane was tossed overboard. Dunning drowned in the cockpit. A hero and a pioneer. Dunning had proved that you could land on a ship. Now the Navy worked on creating more deck space to make it easier. You need to remove this obstacle of the bridge to free up as much of the deck space as possible. So one option is simply to move the bridge over to one side. But you can see how unbalanced that becomes. The ship tilts. To counteract that, you could design in the fuel tanks over on the opposite side and get the ship nice and level again. But once the engine starts to burn up that fuel, those tanks become more and more empty until you're back to square one. Another option could be to split the bridge on either side of the ship like that. But imagine the poor pilots trying to land in a stormy seas. The risk of clipping a wing would just be too high. After two decades of trial and error, the Royal Navy struck upon the design that would become HMS Ark Royal. The solution was to extend the flight deck on the opposite side to the bridge. This not only solved the balance problem, it also created a much larger area where planes could come and land. This key breakthrough meant that Britain would now be able to construct her first ever purpose-built aircraft carrier from the hull up, Ark Royal. Her flight deck would be 800 feet long and 112 feet wide. That's the surface area of over two football pitches. The two decks below would hold dozens of aircraft, more than any other ship at the time. And yet her three propellers would be capable of driving all this military hardware at a speed of 30 knots. The final plans for Ark Royal were submitted in early 1935. But an arms race was building up against the Axis powers. It was vital that the Admiralty spent its money on the right ships to meet the growing threat. And Ark Royal would be the most expensive ship it had ever commissioned. Would it be worth getting her off the drawing board and into battle? By the mid-1930s, Britain was feeling the pressure from a hostile Nazi Germany's rearmament. Even though the Admiralty already had the world's biggest navy, it needed to build more ships. It was hoped that one of them would be Britain's most advanced aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal. But there was a problem. She was heavy. Too heavy to comply with a shipbuilding treaty Britain had signed after the First World War. She needed to lose weight, and the solution would come from one of the smallest components. I've come to T. Nielsen & Company in Gloucester to find out more about riveting. A technique that's been used to build ships since the middle of the 19th century. First of all, you heat the rivet to soften the metal. Then slot it into the hole before hammering the soft head flat to pinch the plates together. No kidding. There's a lot of power coming in behind that. Yeah, flipping heck, yeah. And trying to control that. So I'm going to give riveting a go with the rivet gun. It's heavy in itself, and then when you start throwing the pneumatic power behind it, it's got a mind of its own. So it's hard to control. And I definitely haven't got the knack. I'm all over the shop with that. I'm absolutely all over the shop. Rivets are not only difficult to apply, they add extra metal to a ship's structure. In order to lose weight, Ark Royal's engineers turned to a more modern method. Welding. All set? Here we go. Good luck everyone. This time, intense heat fuses the sections to be joined together with the metal in the welding rod to create one solid joint. And one of the advantages of welding is, first of all, that you don't have to overlap the two pieces of metal that you're trying to join. Look, you can just butt them up there. And that's a material saving in itself. But also, you don't have to add all of these little rivets. Now that might seem like a small difference, but on a ship the size of Ark Royal, that weight soon adds up. 65% of Ark Royal's hull was welded instead of riveted, and that made the ship 500 tonnes lighter. Welding could not only bring a new aircraft carrier under the weight limits of the treaty, it could also make it faster. And speed would maximise lift under the wings of its planes at take-off. Aircraft would be able to launch every few seconds from Ark Royal's deck. Coming into land, they'd be caught by a network of wires that would quickly bring them to a halt. In April 1937, Ark Royal was finally launched. But this radical new warship had to prove her worth. Ark Royal was probably the most state-of-the-art aircraft carrier in the world at the beginning of the Second World War. She could carry, if the aircraft were available, up to 60 aircraft. She is the apogee of aircraft carrier design. You can argue that she's better than almost anything that anyone else has got. She's a very special ship. Ark Royal had been at sea for less than a year when war was declared. And it wouldn't be long before the ship and her crew were put to the test. The Germans wasted no time in showing the Allies the devastating effect of their deadliest maritime weapon, the U-boat. They could cruise for 7,000 miles, submerge to a depth of 650 feet, and carry 11 deadly torpedoes. But the most terrifying thing of all was that you couldn't see them until it was too late. Their primary targets were cargo ships. In the very first week of war, U-boats sank over 65,000 tons of merchant shipping. Winston Churchill, who was then First Lord of the Admiralty, knew he had to act. And Ark Royal was at the heart of his plans. Now, when you're protecting merchant shipping, actually putting it in convoy and waiting for the enemy to come to you is the best way of dealing with enemy submarines. Churchill's having none of that. He's not willing to sit and wait for the enemy to come to him. So Churchill set up anti-submarine patrols called hunter-killer groups. Their sole function was to destroy U-boats. And Ark Royal's fleet of planes was vital for spotting these enemy subs. I've come to Navy Wings in Yovelton to find out more about the aircraft that Ark Royal carried. Wow, that is beautiful. Just look at that. Absolutely gorgeous. This is a fairy swordfish, and there were three dozen of them on board Ark Royal. The swordfish wings could be folded right back, which meant they could store more of them inside the hull of Ark Royal. But quickly they can be put back in place, ready to take off. A swordfish was more manoeuvrable and had greater range than land-based aircraft. Its simple design could also stand up to the stresses of short take-off and landing. It only had a top speed of 139 miles per hour, but it could cover huge distances, which made a swordfish ideal for spotting U-boats. Now, as you can see, she's no fighter plane like the Spitfire, who could travel almost three times as fast with a top speed of 369 miles per hour. But the swordfish didn't need to be fast because she could deliver one of these. A Mark 12 torpedo, 16 feet long, weighing 1,500 pounds and more than capable of destroying any U-boat. But delivering their payload was easier said than done. Pilots were trained to approach from an altitude of 5,000 feet and then dive down to a release altitude of just 18 feet. Now, the maximum range of a torpedo was 1,500 yards and the minimum distance it needed to stabilise and then arm itself was 500 yards, which meant that after performing a perilous dive down to a dangerously low altitude, the crew would then have to judge by eye the Goldilocks moment when to release the torpedo. On paper, Ark Royal with her squadrons of planes was well placed to hunt down and destroy the submarines that were wreaking havoc. But out in the middle of the Atlantic, the U-boat soon gained the upper hand. Unbeknownst to the crew of Ark Royal, the hunter had become the hunted. Whilst the aircraft were taking off from the deck, another U-boat, completely undetected by Ark Royal, was lining up the carrier in its attack periscope. The captain of the U-boat couldn't believe his luck and fired two torpedoes straight at the side of Ark Royal. Fortunately, Ark Royal's lookouts were alert and spotted the weight of the torpedoes in the water, shouting the alarm immediately. The captain ordered the helm hard over and incredibly, both torpedoes missed, with one exploding harmlessly just off her bow. Having exposed her position, the enemy sub was now at the mercy of British destroyers. They fired off a barrage of depth charges. This forced the submarine to the surface where it was finished off. U-boat 39 was the first to be destroyed during the Second World War and Ark Royal had helped to sink it. Churchill wasted no time in rushing up to Scotland by train to congratulate the crew himself. For Churchill, this was a vindication that the hunter-killer group he'd pushed for had worked. But any celebrations were about to be dramatically cut short. Ark Royal may have escaped but another hunter-killer aircraft carrier soon became the first British warship to be sunk by German forces. Over 500 crewmen were killed. The U-boat got away. After this devastating loss of life, Churchill disbanded the hunter-killer groups. Just 10 days after nearly being sunk by a German U-boat, HMS Ark Royal was under attack once again, but this time from the air. She'd been spotted by a group of enemy reconnaissance planes just off the coast of Denmark who radioed her position to a force of German bombers. One seemed to choose Ark Royal from the other ships, came in low and dropped a bomb but given again the ship's capacity to manoeuvre, she was able to escape the bomb coming down. One problem with bombs dropped at relatively high altitude, you can see them coming and you can avoid them and so she narrowly escaped. So narrowly that some Germans thought she'd been hit. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels even ordered Radio Hamburg to broadcast in English a direct question to the Royal Navy. Where was HMS Ark Royal? This had the effect of making her one of the most famous ships on the planet. But the Nazi propaganda attack was about to rebound on the Nazis with devastating results. The Nazis had told the world that Ark Royal had been destroyed. But the fact that she'd survived gave the Allies a huge boost in morale. Every time the Ark Royal is attacked, Hummer is unscathed. Other aircraft carriers do get sunk but not the Ark Royal and that just makes it all the more important to keep emphasising the survival and success of this ship. So it becomes an iconic way of hitting back at the Germans. It carries an awful lot of value. Over and above its combat effectiveness, which is significant. But Ark Royal was soon to take on one of Hitler's most dangerous warships, the Graf Spee. She was one of three so-called pocket battleships in the German fleet. They might not have been big, but they were deadly. They are small cruiser-sized warships with very large battleship-sized guns on them and they really only have one job and that is to raid the oceans for merchant shipping. They are commerce raiders. Their job is to get out into those Atlantic sea lanes and sink merchant ships. In the first three months of the war alone, Graf Spee sank nine ships. The battleship had to be stopped. Ark Royal was perfectly equipped to find and sink her. So aircraft carriers, and particularly the big fleet carriers, are an ideal tool for looking for pocket battleships. They have reconnaissance aircraft that can spread over thousands of miles of ocean to find them. And then if they find that pocket battleship, they can then deploy strike aircraft like this Swordfish to go and sink it. So it's an ideal purpose for a fleet carrier. Three Allied cruisers found Graf Spee first. They had her cornered in the South Atlantic off the coast of Uruguay near the River Plate. But despite being outnumbered, this powerful battleship was undeterred. Quite surprisingly, Captain Langsdorff of the Graf Spee decided not to flee. Instead, he ordered his crew to battle stations and his ship to full speed. He was going to take on all three ships. It was the first naval battle of the Second World War. Graf Spee beat the cruisers back and escaped with a damaged fuel system and low on ammo. If Ark Royal could join the fight, she could help finish off this formidable enemy. The Graf Spee had been hit an astonishing 17 times and was forced to put into port here in Montevideo in Uruguay. Now, at this point in the war, Uruguay was a neutral country, which meant that any ships at war on either side was limited to 72 hours in port. And as Captain Langsdorff rushed to get his repairs done, the British Navy was set on making sure that the ship was sunk as soon as she left port. The only problem was that Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown were almost 2,000 miles away here. And without them, there was a real risk that the Graf Spee would make a run for it and escape. But a British naval officer came up with a crafty plan. He spread false information, which German spies picked up, that Ark Royal was just on the other side of the river plate. The news soon filtered through to Langsdorff, the captain of Graf Spee, who knew his ship could never outrun the planes of the mighty aircraft carrier. If he went out and fought a last battle with the British, his ship would be sunk, his crew would be killed, and he wasn't prepared to take responsibility for that. Langsdorff would never surrender Graf Spee into British hands. Once she left Montevideo, he and his crew took to the lifeboats. Then, explosives were detonated to sink the battleship. The British bluff had worked. Ark Royal's reputation could even sink a ship that was thousands of miles outside her range. The mere possibility of her presence had led the Nazis to destroy one of their top ships. Smoke and flames still pouring from the smouldering hull of a once mighty warship that challenged the might of the British Navy and failed. Langsdorff sent a telegram to the German ambassador, meant for the Fuhrer himself. It read, I alone bear the responsibility for the scuttling of the battleship. I'm happy to pay with my life for any possible reflection on the honour of the flag. Once Langsdorff and his crew were safe in Argentina, he lay down on the Nazi flag and shot himself. The Battle of the Atlantic raged on, but Ark Royal was urgently needed elsewhere. She joined a vital task force to keep the Mediterranean open to the British. But there, her enemies would be too close for comfort. After France falls, almost all of the coastline of the Mediterranean is hostile. You've got German occupied territory all the way around to Turkey. There is no friendly coastline for the British. But if they can't use the Mediterranean, they can't interdict the German armies in North Africa under Rommel and the Italian armies that are trying to reach Alexandria. So having some sort of presence in the central Mediterranean is absolutely vital. That presence comes from Malta. The island of Malta was of huge strategic importance at this point in the war. It was an airbase that allowed the British to stop German supplies coming from Europe to Northern Africa. And planes from here could protect British convoy ships, bringing much-needed tanks to the region. It was a thorn in the side of Hitler, who knew that if Malta fell, Northern Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean would come under his control. In May 1941, Ark Royal was part of a convoy carrying essential supplies across the Mediterranean. It was a dangerous mission. She would be up against the combined might of the Italian and German armed forces. And for this, she would need a very special plane. This is the Fairey Fulmer. Maximum speed of 280 miles per hour. It could carry a 500-pound bomb and a range of over a thousand miles. And most importantly for combat missions from Ark Royal, like the Swordfish, its wings could also be folded right back towards the tail. Again, allowing it to be stored inside the ship's hull. Ark Royal was carrying 12 Fulmer. And was about to need every last one of them. As the convoy braved the Mediterranean, the Fulmers soon had to fight off eight Italian bombers. So the Italians have a lot of medium bombers, and they fly in tight formations, and they drop their bombs in very tight patterns. The Ark Royal is surrounded by bombs exploding in the water. But it just steams straight through. There are no hits. So flying at high altitude and dropping bombs on fast-moving ships is a failure. Ark Royal had escaped. But in her fight with the Italian Air Force, she'd already lost almost half of her Fulmers. One was shot down. Four too badly damaged to fight. And the convoy was still a long way from Malta. To make matters worse, Ark Royal's journey would now take her past the island of Sicily, home to a Luftwaffe airbase. At 20 past seven, the British admiral in the Mediterranean received radar echoes coming from Sicily. He confirmed his worst fears. A massive formation of aircraft was heading towards the fleet. Fifteen Stuka dive bombers, protected by six Messerschmitts, emerged from the clouds. And headed straight for Ark Royal. By this time, the Ark Royal's fighter force was down to only seven Fulmers. So these seven aircraft had to keep many times their number of aircraft at bay. Wave after wave of fighters duelled with the Fulmers. If the bombers got through, Ark Royal's convoy wouldn't get their supplies to Malta. Germany could take control not just of North Africa, but the entire Mediterranean. The odds were stacked against them. Their only hope was to keep as many of the seven planes up in the air as possible. And that meant a manic turnaround each time one returned to the deck. So if you can imagine, in the heat of an air battle, a Fulmer comes in to land. And amidst the noise of anti-aircraft fire, as well as the constant risk of being shot at themselves, the crew would have to refuel the plane. Reload any ammunition. Repair any bullet holes in the wings. All of this with zero time to spare. It would have been like a hive of activity that you'd find at a Formula One pit stop. But with the stakes being life and death. Ark Royal's pilots were outnumbered by seven to one. But that didn't stop them. They flew straight at the Stukas, firing as they went. The bravery of the British pilots forced the Germans to retreat. Against astonishing odds, seven Fulmers were able to see off over 50 enemy aircraft. And the convoy, led by Ark Royal, successfully made it through to Malta and beyond. By 1941, HMS Ark Royal had built a reputation. Not just in the British Navy, but around the globe. She'd proven that aircraft carriers were the future. And thanks to a Nazi propaganda campaign, she was famous worldwide. She'd become a thorn in the side for Hitler. But it was her next confrontation that would lift her to legendary status. This time, Ark Royal would be pitted against the most powerful warship in the world. The Bismarck. She was armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated weaponry. Over a third of her weight was made up from her armour. Which, in some places, was over a foot thick. Despite that, she was almost as fast as any of the Royal Navy's battleships. She was very hard to sink. And she was very much a formidable threat, something about which the Admiralty worried considerably. The thought of that ship getting into the Atlantic convoy lanes is absolutely devastating. Britain is entirely dependent on resource that comes in by sea, mostly from North America, from Canada and the United States. So there is literally a lifeline for Britain that runs across the Atlantic. And the Germans need to do everything they can to cut that lifeline. The Bismarck had to be sunk to save Britain's supply lines. And it would need a new kind of warship to take her on. An aircraft carrier like Ark Royal. In May 1941, a long-range Spitfire spotted the Bismarck in a fjord near Bergen. The Admiralty knew that this was their chance. That they had to act fast before she disappeared into the Atlantic. HMS Suffolk spotted the Bismarck around here and a radio call went out. HMS Hood and Prince of Wales were 300 miles to the south, but wasted no time in steaming ahead to try and cut off the Bismarck before she could enter the wider Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ark Royal, which was down in Gibraltar, also received a radio message ordering her to sea to try and help intercept this mighty German battleship. On the evening of the 26th of May, Ark Royal launched an attack with a squadron of swordfish. But even in fine conditions, starting the engine on a swordfish was risky business. Ground crewmen would have to manually crank the mechanism to build up momentum inside. And then the pilot would engage the engine. You'd have to make sure you were well out of the way of the propellers so you didn't get shredded to bits. But that night, a powerful storm was blowing. Waves were crashing across the deck. The flight deck was seesawing 16 meters up and down. No plane had ever taken off from a carrier in weather as bad as this. Ark Royal's swordfish found the Bismarck and attempted a broadside attack so their torpedoes would have the widest possible target. The Nazis were shelling the aircraft at a rate of one per second. And even without hitting the planes, the blasts were strong enough to blow them off course. This is the pivot point of the Second World War. If the Bismarck gets away with this sortie, she'll come out again and the convoy system will remain under threat. One pilot managed to get in low enough to start his attack run. But just as he was about to fire, his observer shouted, Not yet! With waves the size of a house, the observer who sat at the back of the plane knew that for a torpedo to run true, it would have to land in the trough of a wave and not on the peak, otherwise it might go off in any direction. And the only way to be sure was to lean right out of the plane and see the waves himself. At just the right moment, he released the torpedo, which sped straight into the stern of the Bismarck. Battleships are very vulnerable around the stern. That's where the propellers are, that's where the rudder is. You hit at the stern, then the battleship is in deep trouble. That's exactly what happened to Bismarck. And this means that Bismarck is steering in circles. She can't get home. Her steering is broken. And at that point, it's game over for the Germans. They cannot escape this situation. It's just a matter of time. The next morning, two British battleships turn up and knock it to pieces very quickly. It's over. Ark Royal has scored what is by far the most spectacular victory. One torpedo hit has taken out a 60,000-ton battleship. The sinking of the Bismarck was a huge morale boost for Churchill and the Allies. But for the pilots of Ark Royal who'd sealed the ship's fate, there was no celebrating. As the Bismarck sank, they'd watched as 2,400 German sailors jumped overboard in a dangerously stormy sea. Just over a hundred survived. Hitler was furious. For six months, he hunted the aircraft carrier that had brought down his flagship. He was dead set on revenge against Ark Royal. And eventually, Axis spies got wind of her whereabouts. On the 13th of November, 1941, the sonar operator on board a destroyer escorting Ark Royal reported hearing something on the anti-submarine sonar system. His superior officer, however, dismissed the noise as the propeller of another British destroyer traveling with the fleet. Just one minute later, a German torpedo exploded into the side of Ark Royal. It ripped through the hull and knocked out the ship's electrical power, disabling vital control systems. Ark Royal began to fill up with water. Thirty minutes after the explosion, the captain managed to get some preliminary damage reports. And although it was listing in the water, the ship was holding steady. With Gibraltar nearby, the captain thought the ship could be saved. Of the three tugs that set off from Gibraltar, one got lost. Another saw the state of Ark Royal and immediately turned back, leaving just one tugboat to try and pull this giant ship back to port on its own. But the ship's joints were beginning to leave. At four o'clock in the morning, the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Shortly afterwards, she rolled over and sank to the seabed. Amazingly, out of the 1,700 crew on board, only one man was reported dead, and he'd been killed in the initial explosion. It was a tragic end to one of World War II's most iconic ships. Ark Royal's legendary status in the Royal Navy was earned by a crew who displayed great courage. When she was launched, there were no rules on how to captain an aircraft carrier, or guidelines on how to mount an aerial assault from the sea. These lessons were learned in the chaos of war, and paid for with the lives of heroic pilots and sailors. Ark Royal's legacy is here, on this ship, and on every aircraft carrier afloat today.