Fisher's Folly—The Fabulous Furious

When Lady Patricia Ramsey was shown over the British aircraft carrier Furious, which her husband commanded at the time, she jokingly exclaimed: “What a monstrosity! My husband is in charge of a garage!”

And Furious, even as carriers go, was a queer-looking ship, but her looks were only a surface indication of her bizarre career. Designed originally as a cruiser mounting 18-inch guns and a huge battery of torpedo tubes, she underwent four major alterations before assuming her final conformation. Even so she was a fighter. Her planes conducted the first carrier strike on a land base in history when attacking German Zeppelin sheds in World War I, and they took on the mighty battleship Tirpitz in World War II.

Furious was the brain-child of Admiral Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, hero to some, megalomaniac to others, but a man to be reckoned with by all in the Royal Navy. When Lord Fisher returned to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in October, 1914, he had conceived a naval offensive which required very special classes of warships. He did not believe the small British Expeditionary Force should have been sent to France to be sandwiched between two French armies and shut off away from the sea and the Royal Navy. Instead, both Fisher and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty at that time, saw that the war was stagnating in costly and exhausting trench warfare on the Western Front. Both saw the advantages in a heavily re-armed Russian Army opposing the Austro-Germanic drive eastward, but each supported a different scheme to achieve this end.

Churchill’s plan is well known; he hoped to open the Black Sea to the Allies by forcing the Dardanelles and entering the Sea of Marmora. Born under a black cloud of divided loyalties and skepticisms in London and carried out in a desultory manner, the Dardanelles-Gallipoli operation was doomed from the first and is remembered today as One of the costliest fiascos of that war. Perhaps one reason for this failure was the lack of support it received from Lord Fisher who was busily preparing his own scheme. He was of the opinion that the arms and ammunition given to the B.E.F. should have gone instead to the Czar’s troops fighting bare-legged and hungry in the snow. Had this been done, “the Russians never would have sustained the appalling losses they did in pitting pikes against rifles and machine guns.” He went one step further, and after adding the Russian millions to the Royal Navy, he came up with an amphibious invasion of Pomerania as the answer to the stalemate of trench warfare. Fisher believed this dream operation would have won the war by 1915!

Such an invasion would require a whole new series of ships and small craft of many types—some of which the Royal Navy had never seen before. Thus, in the great shipbuilding program authorized at this time, there was provision made not only for the destroyers and minesweepers so much needed in the North Sea, but for other types, entirely novel, which were to be used in the execution of Fisher’s plan. The most striking of these new vessels were described as “hush- hush” ships; there were three vessels which particularly answered this description owing to the peculiar and abnormal features of their design and the secrecy maintained in regard to them. The new vessels were officially described as large light cruisers and were to carry few guns but these of the largest caliber. Their protection was exceedingly light, their speed not less than that of the 30-knot Renown class battlecruisers, and their draft not to exceed 22 feet, or about five feet less than that of any existing capital ship.

Fisher believed that “speed is armor” and built these three great ships, Courageous, Glorious, and Furious, almost without protective plating but with enormous speed. Except for their high speed, Courageous and Glorious were superficially normal ships.¹ Furious, however, was a pup from a different litter. Laid down at Armstrong-Whitworth on June 8, 1915, she took somewhat longer to complete than her two sisters. As contracted for, she was to displace 19,100 tons with a length of 785 feet, beam of 88 feet, and the shallow draft required for the proposed Baltic operations—just 21 feet. As with the first two large cruisers, she had no side armor proper, but a two-inch plating over a one-inch plating athwart the magazines and machinery spaces. An unusually large underwater bulge protected against mines and torpedoes. She was fitted with Brown-Curtiss turbines, Yarrow boilers, and could do 31 knots with 90,000 SHP!

The big surprise, however, in a ship full of surprises, was her proposed main armament—another of Lord Fisher’s schemes: “The sine qua non in these great ships must ever be that they carry the biggest possible guns. It was for this reason that the 18-inch gun was introduced in the autumn of 1914 and put on board the new battle-cruiser Furious . . . Her guns with their enormous shells were built to make it impossible for the Germans to prevent the Russian millions from landing on the Pomeranian Coast! You can easily imagine the German Army fleeing for its life from Pomerania to Berlin. The Furious (and all her breed) were not built for salvoes! They were built for Berlin and that’s why they drew so little water and were built so fragile, so as to weigh as little as possible, and so to go faster.”

Originally Furious was to carry two of these massive 18-inch guns in separate barbettes, one forward and one aft, along with eleven 5.5-inch guns and eighteen 21- inch torpedo tubes. The 18-inch guns, together with their mountings, were built by the firm of Armstrong-Whitworth and were installed in the monitors Lord Clive, General Wolfe, and Prince Eugene, as well as in the Furious. Firing a ton-and-a-half projectile which could pierce 22 inches of the new hard- faced armor at 20,000 yards, the guns had a maximum range of thirty miles.

The exigencies of the war caused her building to be hurried, and Furious was made and armed with all sorts of bits and pieces. “Her secondary armament was spare guns from two Greek light cruisers then building at Birkenhead, and parts of ancient ships long since scrapped were built into her anatomy. When something quasi-vital inside her broke during the Second World War, the dockyard was asked for a replacement. Back came the answer, ‘This fitting originated from the battleship Neptune broken up in 1903, and it is regretted that no spare exists’ ”!

Launched on August 15, 1916, after a little more than a year on the building ways, the Furious had already felt the press of world events. The ship was left as something of an orphan when Lord Fisher, in a huff with Churchill over the Dardanelles fiasco, resigned from his post as First Sea Lord.² Meanwhile, however, naval aviation was beginning to receive some small notice, and on March 2, 1917, before she was commissioned, it was decided to fit Furious as a seaplane carrier. More than eight vessels had by this time been equipped to carry seaplanes, including the Engadine which had conducted aerial scouting operations at Jutland. Experiments had also been carried out with seaplanes pulled across the North Sea on destroyer-towed barges; when a German Zeppelin appeared the destroyer would steam up to full speed and the aircraft would rise in an almost vertical take-off upward from the barge. “The next stage was ships from which it was possible to fly off ordinary land planes, which were faster and handier than seaplanes fitted with floats. The first of these was the former Cunarder Campania, which had a sloping platform at her bows down which the planes half rolled, half took off, and a similar arrangement was fitted in the Furious before she was completed, replacing her forward 18-inch gun.” The forward flying-off deck was about 160 feet long, tapered towards the bows, and had collapsible wind-breaking palisades. There was also a power-operated lift forward of the conning tower to hoist airplanes from the forward hangar to the flying-off deck.

At length Furious was commissioned on June 26, 1917, and at the time her type rather defied cataloging—she was neither fish nor fowl. Sporting an 18-inch gun on one end and a spindly little ramp at the other, the huge one-funneled ship indeed looked a freak. No small wonder that Furious, Courageous, and Glorious were known as Spurious, Outrageous, and Uproarious, respectively throughout the Grand Fleet!

Under Captain Wilmot S. Nicholson, C.B., Furious commenced carrying out gunnery and aviation trials that summer. During this period she fired her 18-inch gun several times, and it is said that “it shook her up considerably”—probably a good example of British understatement, if we consider her lightweight construction. When first completed, Furious carried four Short seaplanes and six Sopwith “Pups”; these were easily flown off the bows, but there was difficulty in getting the seaplanes shipped inboard by derricks. The Sopwith “Pups” were fitted with folding wings and in many respects were an early forerunner of most carrier aircraft of today.

The disadvantage that such aircraft suffered from was that they were always forced to land at sea, and this was disastrous unless the aircraft in question was a seaplane! Flight-Lieutenant E. N. Dunning, one of the pioneers of the Fleet Air Arm, attempted to find a solution to this challenge. Not content with flying his Sopwith “Pup” off the forward platform he wanted to try to land on it. The maneuver which was to be made with the ship steaming fast, entailed an S-turn in front of the bridge and funnel superstructure which, at this time, had not been altered. He eventually persuaded his enterprising captain, Nicholson, to let him try it, and the result was a success on the first occasion. His very maneuverable Sopwith “Pup” with a low minimum flying speed arrived over the platform and was actually pulled down on deck by the sailors. After this first successful landing, Dunning came back for more “five days later, on August 10th, and just had too much side slip on. He skidded across the deck, fell over the side and the ship passed over the top of his aircraft with him inside.” Landing operations were suspended for that autumn and the ship joined the First Cruiser Squadron at Rosyth, where Courageous and Glorious had preceded her.

The three big cruisers were, on the face of it, admirably suited for the work assigned to them; i.e., watching for sorties by German light cruisers and torpedo craft. Alarms and excursions were frequent on both sides in the North Sea at that time, and actual minor clashes occurred only slightly less often. The minefields maintained by the British and Germans at the eastern edge of the turbulent triangle were frequently the cause of opposing units clashing as the continuous sweeping and laying operations took place. German Zeppelins from Tondern in Schleswig-Holstein, in conjunction with seaplanes from Sylt, “formed the first line of defense against the ever increasing British minelaying sorties in the North Sea and the Kattegat.”

On October 15, two German cruiser- minelayers and several destroyers were found to be at sea heading northwestward. Admiral Beatty ordered light units to sea to search the area thoroughly for the enemy. “After receiving a further telegram from the Admiralty telling him that Zeppelins would probably be out on reconnaissance during the 16th, Admiral Beatty ordered the Furious (with her aircraft complement) to sweep along the 56th parallel as far as longitude 4° East, and to return after dark . . . The Furious, accompanied by the destroyers Onslow, Oriana, Penn, and Tower, sailed at 5 A.M. on the 16th and carried out her orders without incident.” Later that evening Furious' orders were changed, and she joined Courageous and Glorious in reinforcing the Second Light Cruiser Squadron for the impending action. Despite the quite heavy odds against them, the German vessels slipped through the British cordon at night and escaped safely back to Kiel, after having badly mauled a Scandinavian convoy.

The inability of Furious to recover her aircraft was pointedly demonstrated during this operation, and she was placed under further review by the Admiralty. It was decided to remove the disappointing 18-inch gun aft. It never had been successful, and airmen felt the space could be used for a “landing-on deck,” the advantages of which would be incalculable. Accordingly, in November, 1917, the ship was withdrawn from active service and placed in dockyard hands. At this time her main mast with its gunnery controls was removed, as was one of the 5.5- inch guns. The remaining ten guns in her secondary battery were redistributed and five 3-inch anti-aircraft guns were added. The ship retained her huge funnel, tripod foremast, and bridge (all on the center line as originally constructed) as well as both barbettes for the 18-inch guns. (The after barbette was used for some time as a circular wardroom, probably the only one ever to have been enclosed within ten inches of armor!) Four sets of triple 21-inch torpedo tubes were installed on the upper deck near the funnel.

The most revolutionary feature, however, was the flying-on deck which was installed immediately abaft the funnel, running some 300 feet aft. Extending almost to the stern, the 100 foot wide deck had a huge inverted- U shaped frame at its forward end from which a stopping net—the forerunner of today’s barrier—was hung. As with the flying-off deck forward, the hangar beneath the deck could accommodate some ten planes and was made accessible by a power-operated lift. Narrow decks on each side of the funnel connected the two flight decks, small trolleys on rails being used to move the seaplanes forward or aft along them. Experiments were conducted with lines stretched out on the flying-on deck athwartships and weighted down with sand bags as a rudimentary sort of arresting gear. The conversion, done under war-time acceleration, was completed by March, 1918, and with very little “shake-down” Furious rejoined the Rosyth squadron almost immediately.

By this time it had fallen to the Grand Fleet to patrol the northern and northwestern ends of the minefields, although regular German mine-sweeping operations seemed to have ceased at the north end of Heligoland Bight. The enemy’s airships were, however, continually patrolling the Bight, and it was against these that British sallies were chiefly directed. The air arm was called more and more into service and after May the Furious sailed at more or less regular intervals for some point on the outer edge of the minefield and sent up aircraft. These operations were mostly uneventful, though on one occasion Furious and the light cruiser forces were bombed by aircraft from Sylt. Zeppelins after the first year or two of the war actually did comparatively little bombing, but rather confined their activities to reconnaissance. Besides hampering the British minelaying program, they were also credited with supplying the Germans with invaluable information for both their surface raids and submarine attacks on the Norwegian convoys. It was the great effectiveness of the long range observation flights from Tondern which determined the Royal Navy Air Service to make a strong endeavour to put an end to the menace by destroying the Zeppelin base.

Carrier-borne aircraft were the only weapons available to strike Tondern and, accordingly, the Furious was made ready for the job. On the dawn of July 19, the heavily- escorted carrier turned into the wind and launched two flights of Camel biplanes on the first carrier-based air raid on an enemy ashore in history. The air station was taken almost by complete surprise as the words of one of Germany’s most famous airship pilots, Von Butlar, will testify:

“It was quite light by the time they appeared. At first they were flying high, but while they were still small specks I saw them begin to plane down, as though following a prearranged plan. It was all over in a minute or two after that. Part of them headed for one shed and part for the other. Diving with their engines all out—or so it seemed —they came over with the combined speed from their drop and the pull from their propellors. Down they came, till they seemed to be going to ram the sheds. Then, one after another, they flattened out and passed lengthwise over their targets at a height of about forty metres, kicking loose bombs as they went.

“Our guns simply had no chance at all with them. In fact, one of the guns came pretty near to getting knocked out itself. It was so reckless a piece of work that I couldn’t help noticing it, even while my own airship was beginning to burst into flames. One of the pilots, it seems, must have found that he had a bomb or two left at about the same time he spotted the position of one of the guns firing at him. Banking steeply, round he came, dived straight at the battery, letting go a bomb as his sight came on when he was no more than fifteen metres above it. Then he waved his hand and dashed off after the other machines, which were already scattering to avoid the German planes beginning to converge on them from all directions. It was one of the finest examples of nerve I ever saw.

“The precaution we had taken of opening the doors of the main shed saved it from total destruction, for the airships, instead of exploding, only burned comparatively slowly; but Tondern, as an air station, had practically ceased to exist from that moment.”

As an actual result of this dramatic foreshadowing of the future wedding of sea power to air power, two sheds were wrecked, and the airships L.54 and L.60 which were housed in them destroyed. Many of the attacking airplanes were lost attempting the landing at sea or by flying on into Denmark, but the eventual tally showed only one pilot unaccounted for; he was presumed lost at sea. The Furious had at last proved her worth, and the Zeppelin patrols over the Heligoland Bight slackened considerably and were never again a serious factor in the war.

For the next several months Furious resumed her more routine job of patrol and constant readiness for an action that never came. Operational use of the new landing-on deck aft of the stack continued to receive attention, but the entire concept was found none too successful. “Nine attempted landings ended in crashes, and it soon became a catch phrase in the fleet that a successful naval aviator was one who did not kill himself deck-flying.” Eventually, however, even small blimps such as SSZ-59 and NS-1 found occasion to briefly roost on the flying-on deck.

Furious with the rest of the Grand Fleet, merely by looking grim and swinging at anchor in Scapa Flow or Rosyth, helped win the war. By the end of the summer of 1918, a starved and beaten Germany was writhing in the constricting coils of one of the most effective blockades in modern times. In October the home front began to collapse, and on Tuesday, November 4, 1918, the Red Tide engulfed the High Seas Fleet and the war was over. On November 21, sixty-nine warships constituting the bulk of this fleet sailed in sullen defeat down two long lines of British and American warships. Furious was there, flying the flag of Rear Admiral E. M. Phillimore, appointed Commander of the Fleet Air Arm by Admiral Beatty. Her crew could look directly across the line of German ships and see the Sixth Battle Squadron, the American battleships with their tall cage masts.

Experiments in the Royal Navy with aviation did not cease at the end of the war, and after a year laid up in reserve at Rosyth, Furious was once again reviewed with the intention of increasing her effectiveness. Wartime operations had demonstrated how badly severe eddies and air currents caused by the ship’s superstructure affected the handling of aircraft immediately before and after they landed. Still another problem was the lack of storage facilities for aircraft and their fuel, and the shifting of planes from one flight deck to the other always caused delays.

Several attempts were made to find a suitable design and eventually the long, flush flight deck (such as found on the Argus and the American Langley) was evolved. Paid off to the care and maintenance party at Rosyth on June 14, 1921, Furious spent more than a year having the last vestiges of her cruiser design removed and torn out. The one huge funnel, the tall tripod mast and bridge structure, and the temporary flying- on deck aft with its hangar, all these disappeared. By June 23, 1922, Furious, or what was left of her, was ready to be moved to Devonport for her rebuilding and outfitting.

A new flight deck was added extending roughly three-quarters the length of the ship at a height of seventy-five feet from the water’s edge. Beginning less than fifty feet from the stern, the deck ran level until approximately amidships, then took a gentle upward slope leading to another level area containing the aircraft elevator. The forward edge of this main flight deck did not extend forward to the bow, but jutted out in a curved lip overhanging the old original flying-off deck. The navigating bridge was placed well forward on the starboard side, and was capable of being lowered flush with the flight deck for flight operations. It was from here that the ship was conned, while flight operations were directed by the Flight Commander from a similar platform, or bridge, on the port side. Sloping palisades were built along each side of the upper flight deck forward (to prevent planes from slipping overboard in the event of faulty landings), and wind screens of perforated steel which could be easily raised and lowered were mounted athwartships in the same area.

As this was to be a truly flush-deck carrier, the problem concerning disposal of the combustion products from the main boilers was a considerable one. Regular stacks were obviously out of the question, but a method was devised whereby the smoke was led aft in long trunks, mixed with cold air, and allowed to escape right astern through ducts in the sides of the ship. This design, though quite ingenious, was not used again, for the ducts themselves took up valuable room in the hangars, and it was later found practical to place funnels in a small “island” superstructure such as is common today on the larger carriers. Furious now had two levels of hangars and space enough, all told, for some thirty-four war planes of various types. Her other armament consisted of ten 5.5- inch guns, six 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, and four 3-pounders. The twelve torpedo tubes aft were left aboard, although it was problematical whether or not an enemy vessel big enough to be worth shooting torpedoes at would not have sunk the weakly-armored Furious long before she was within their effective range.

Under command of Captain R. G. H. Henderson, C.B., Furious was recommissioned at Devonport and sailed to rejoin the Home Fleet on September 7, 1925. She was hailed as a tremendous advance over the Argus and the ex-battleship Eagle, but in many respects compared not quite so favorably with foreign carriers of the same era. An interesting comparison was often made between the Furious on the one hand and the American Lexington and Japanese Akagi on the other. All three vessels were originally intended to be battlecruisers, but for one reason or another all were converted to fleet carriers by 1927. Lexington and Akagi both were about 33,000 tons displacement, could steam at 33 knots, and were well protected by an armor belt of approximately five inches. Lexington carried some eighty- eight planes, eight 8-inch and twelve 5-inch guns, while her Japanese contemporary carried fifty-odd planes and was only slightly less well armed.³

For the next decade the carrier followed the established routine of the peace-time Navy as budgets were slashed and the Oxford Oath took hold. These were the piping times of the naval treaties and very little actual advance was made in the combat efficiency of the Royal Navy’s Air Arm. “There were, during the period 1924-34, three zones to which pilots normally went: the Atlantic (or Home) Fleet, the Mediterranean Fleet, and the Far East. Furious and Courageous belonged to the Home Fleet, Glorious to the Mediterranean, and Eagle and Hermes shared the Far East. . . .

“The ships followed a set routine. In general, about the beginning of January, the Home Fleet would cruise to Gibraltar and then to Malta for rendezvous with the Mediterranean Fleet, or perhaps to the Canaries. Returning about the end of March, a period of hectic activity ashore was followed by the first summer cruise—possibly up to Scarborough and Rosyth—and then the second cruise, to Scapa Flow, using Cromarty Firth from time to time. Then the autumn cruise off the northwest of Scotland and return south in preparation for the annual cruise to Gibraltar.”

By 1930, Furious was operating her Dart torpedo bombers and Flycatcher fighters with all the aplomb and confidence that comes from years of experience. Equipment was revised, and new tactical doctrine and concepts formulated. The arresting wires on deck had been declared obsolete, and the run of a landing aircraft was checked by the ramp, or incline, built into the flight deck. As in most British carriers, a small amount of steam was let out at the forward end of the flight deck during flight operations. This allowed the conning officer to determine the relative wind direction and enabled him to maneuver the ship so as to bring her head directly into the wind. In the Furious, aircraft were capable of being launched “simultaneously from two decks; those from the upper deck turned to port, and those from the lower deck to starboard in order to avoid risk of collision.”

The Dart torpedo bomber was the mainstay of the Air Arm at this time, and Furious carried a large proportion of them among her thirty-two planes. They were exercised frequently in war problems and quite often the carrier herself played target for her brood as they swooped down to launch practice torpedoes. The accuracy of one such attack gave Furious one of the most original souvenirs in the Royal Navy. It was a torpedo, its red head crushed beyond repair, which stood in the wardroom as a post-box.

Routine duty with both the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets continued until early 1939 when Furious was once again taken in hand for modernization. A small bridge and mast structure were added on the starboard side forward, and the old system of arresting wires again resorted to. The forward flying- off deck was no longer used for flight operations after this refit, and the main flight deck was leveled out, removing the incline. Her armament was completely renovated with the old 5.5-inch guns removed in favor of twelve 4.5-inch guns plus three multiple pompoms.

The elderly carrier was barely out of the dockyard when World War II exploded over Europe in all its fury. The Royal Navy was strained to its utmost and although Furious was soon in constant demand, the opening of the dolorous Norwegian Campaign offered her her first real chance to come to grips with the enemy.

She responded in characteristic style. Operating for weeks at a time in incredibly bad weather, her squadrons became a very real thorn in the side of the German invader both afloat and ashore. She made naval history when her ancient Swordfish attacked three German destroyers anchored smugly in sheltered Trondheim Fiord. Only one “possible” hit was claimed, but it was the very first time warships had been attacked by torpedo bombers launched from a carrier at sea—a portent of the later sea-air battles which were to rage ’round the world from Taranto to Tokyo.

The Luftwaffe eventually located Furious in her Lofoten Island hide-out and a single German bomber managed to drop two bombs close aboard, stripping some of the delicate blading from her port turbines. This, the only battle-wound she was ever to receive, caused a considerable reduction in her speed and operational efficiency and for the next year she was relegated to the somewhat ignominious role of an aircraft transport. The Admiralty ruled that the crippled Furious was far more valuable at sea than languishing in port waiting her turn at the already choked shipyards.

Accordingly, the oldest operational carrier in the world limped gamely from Britain to Malta or Takoradi, carrying thirty or forty precious Hurricane fighters on each trip. Her “club runs” soon became an epic adventure in themselves and the reinforcements she brought were to prove invaluable to Britain’s embattled Mediterranean forces.

She underwent a complete rebuilding of her worn-out insides in an American yard during early 1942, but her advanced age and rather limited aircraft capacity precluded any further front line work. Re-rated as an escort carrier, she took up convoy and escort duties with the Home Fleet. Furious did play an important part in Operation Torch —the Allied landings in North Africa—and made an occasional offensive thrust into Norwegian waters, but much bigger game was in prospect.

The huge German battleship Tirpitz lay at anchor in Altenfiord, her hull shattered by a brilliantly executed midget submarine attack. Temporary repairs were being rushed by her crew. The British considered it vital to hit the ship again before she could escape south to Germany for a complete overhaul. Since she lay well outside the range of R. A.F. bombers based in Britain, the Fleet Air Arm was called in and Furious commenced the first in a series of raids aimed at exterminating the Tirpitz.

The first attack, on April 3, started at dawn just as the 44,000-ton battleship was getting underway for her post-repair trials. Twenty-one Barracuda dive bombers and eighty fighters from Furious and Victorious caught the Germans by complete surprise. Hardly a gun was fired, and though the raid lasted less than a minute, the Tirpitz was badly hurt. Fifteen to twenty medium sized bombs tore up her superstructure, wrecked her fire control system, and killed some 300 men. Her immediate return to Germany was now out of the question, but just to make sure, the British force came back again on April 25. This attack was aborted by bad weather in the area; subsidiary targets received the lethal cargo instead.

Repairs to the Tirpitz were again energetically pushed forward by her crew, and the Royal Navy once more felt obliged to bring them to a halt. Two more raids were carried out by Furious’ group on the stricken battleship, but the first was rendered ineffective when a U-boat spotted the approaching carrier force and relayed the information to Tromsoe. By the time the British aircraft arrived, Tirpitz was wreathed in clouds of artificial smoke put up by smoke pots along the shore and from the ship herself; the bombing had to be done almost by guess and no hits were observed. The second attack was delivered on August 29 after a week- long wait for a paralyzing overcast to lift. American-made Hellcats from Furious arrived over the ship first and delivered an attack from mast-head height just as the protective smoke started. Only one hit was scored, for by the time the Barracudas and Corsairs from Formidable arrived, the smoke quite obscured the target and the rest of the bombing had to be done blind. Though inconclusive in itself, this last raid did weaken Tirpitz further and she remained in Tromsoe for over two months until the famous “Dam Buster” squadron of the R.A.F. finally sank her with six-ton bombs.

But if the Tirpitz was destroyed, her erstwhile antagonist, Furious, had fared little better. She had literally begun to shake herself to pieces during the high speed runs coincident to the Tromsoe raids, and after a final early September attack on German shipping in Aarundsund, it was more than apparent that the ship was a tired old lady and no longer serviceable. When she began to reduce to reserve on September 16, a signal was made by the Admiralty lauding her for the outstanding service she had rendered for better than a quarter century. She remained in reserve until April 28, 1945, when the First Lord of the Admiralty announced she was to be withdrawn entirely. The war against Germany was going quite favorably, and it was problematical whether Furious would have been of any use in the Far East. At long last, on February 21, 1948, she passed into the hands of the British Iron and Steel Corporation and was broken up for scrap.

The occasional mistakes of a great man are often truly as profound as the man himself. Admiral Fisher, creator of the Dreadnought and the first of the battlecruisers, did err considerably in the original design of the Furious, and the ship was practically useless in her first conformation. It was in her comparative dotage as a warship that she showed her true worth and earned a place for herself alongside the other heroic ships of the Royal Navy. No other ship had ever fought through two great wars with weapons varying from torpedo tubes and 18-inch guns to Swordfish torpedo bombers and Hellcat fighters.