CHAPTER FIVE
It was 1977, and celebrations up and down the country marked Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. Of course, the services paid their own tributes. For the Navy, the climax at the end of June was that time-honoured tradition, a royal review of the Fleet at Spithead.
It was still an impressive assembly of naval power, even if not on the scale of the Coronation Review that Dermot Rhodes had witnessed nearly a quarter of a century earlier. There were some sixty major British warships present, including four nuclear-powered submarines, as well as numerous minor vessels, survey ships, and auxiliaries.
But it was also a twilight parade of the old Navy. The ships which took pride of place had all seen their origins in the Second World War:Ark Royal, with just a year still to serve; Hermes, now a Commando carrier; the cruisers Tiger and Blake, both of whose days were numbered. As The Queen, as Lord High Admiral, reviewed the Fleet from the deck of the Royal Yacht, Britannia, she saw only rare glimpses of the future. There was a clutch of rakish new Type 21 frigates, bought as a stop-gap measure. But, from the three classes of warship that had been at the heart of the new Fleet agreed ten years previously in the wake of the CVA-01 cancellation, there were but two examples: the brand new Type 42 destroyer, HMS Birmingham, following the Royal Yacht and carrying the Admiralty Board, and her older sister ship, HMS Sheffield, which had been the first of the Type 42s.
However, just a month earlier, there had been another significant royal event for the Navy. At the Vickers shipyard at Barrow-In-Furness, in front of a home-grown crowd brimming with pride in what they had created, The Queen had named and sent down the slipway HMS Invincible, the first of the new through-deck cruisers. Inevitably perhaps for such a red-letter day for the Royal Navy, the date had historical significance. On that very day, 3 May, exactly 230 years earlier in 1747, the ship that was to be the very first HMS Invincible had been captured from the French at the first Battle of Cape Finisterre.
Also among the crowd at Vickers was the then Chief of the Defence Staff and former First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward Ashmore. He had been at the heart of much of the manoeuvring over the years that had brought matters to this point. It was, he reflected, the end of a long road, at least as far as he was concerned.
He looked up at the gleaming new hull on the slipway, and then as Invincible thundered into the water, riding high as the tugs gathered her up. As a man who had been familiar with the carriers of old through his career, she seemed very small he thought, even compared to HMS Hermes. ‘But given her presence,’ he concluded, ‘the surface fleet could consider itself viable in wide areas of the sea that would otherwise be denied to it by the air threat’. 1 And that was the important thing.
In truth, she was not that small compared to most of her predecessors, but only really in comparison to what might have been. She was dwarfed by the American super-carriers, and undoubtedly overshadowed by the biggest of Britain’s traditional carriers, Ark Royal and Eagle. And, of course, CVA-01 would have been significantly larger. Her modern, clean-cut lines and relatively light construction also made her look almost dainty, and even rather un-warship-like, next to the carriers of the previous generation. Indeed, by the most traditional measure of warship size, she was a genuine lightweight. She displaced just under 20, 000 tons, compared to 28, 000 tons for Hermes.
But, despite Admiral Ashmore’s impression when he saw her at her launch, she was almost exactly the same size as Hermes, at least in terms of the internal volume of her hull and superstructure, and similar to most of the other carriers that had seen service in the Royal Navy. She stood taller than most of her predecessors too. From her bridge, her commanding officer would be able literally to look down on his counterpart in Hermes.
And, in terms of scale, nothing like Invincible had been designed and actually built for the Royal Navy for a quarter of a century. But she did clearly represent a step down in ambitions, prestige, and capability. And translating the transition and upheaval that she represented into a coherent and workable whole had not been easy for her designers.
From the naval architects’perspective, she sprung from no single tradition of warship design, neither truly the cruiser that she started life as nor a carrier in its purest sense. She was, as two of those involved intimately in her construction were later to explain in a paper before the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, a ‘new genus’ of aircraft-carrying ship. 2
The major characteristics of the final design were settled in the early 1970s under the stewardship of Anthony Austin, a clever designer, but with a reputation for being somewhat difficult and dictatorial. However, the design that emerged largely during his time was elegant in many ways. Ship design, so the naval architects contend, is one of the ultimate exercises in the art of compromise. Invincible, like her predecessor, would divide opinion. But what she embodied was a remarkable achievement, given the pressures and constraints being applied.
From the outset of Invincible’s career, when naval aviators looked at her, they would grumble at the odd and inefficient shape of her hangar – maddeningly narrow in the middle like a dumbbell or a dog’s bone. It hindered her capacity to carry aircraft. The same was true of the island superstructure, which was far larger than on a traditional aircraft carrier, and encroached on vital flight deck space.
The naval designers had a rather different perspective. First, they had not been asked to design a pure aircraft carrier, far from it. It had been a difficult birth to say the least. Secondly, the shape of the hangar and the size of the superstructure were the results of two other decisions that the Admiralty Board had taken – to move to gas turbine engines instead of steam, and to maintain its ships in future by exchanging major machinery rather than repairing it where it was installed. Gas turbines need vast amounts of air flow, and hence huge amounts of ducting. And exchanging heavy machinery requires large passageways up and down through the ship. These clearly encroached on aircraft operations. But, without these elements of the design, Invincible would have had to be bigger and more expensive, and would have required a much larger crew. In fact, Invincible’s complement was half that of an aircraft carrier of similar size from an earlier generation.
None of that would have set the pulse of a Fleet Air Arm pilot racing. But, in the hard-fought battles in Whitehall, it might have made the difference between the ship being built at all and her going the same way as CVA-01.
The other point was that, for all that a maritime Harrier had by now been a gleam in the eyes of the Naval Staff for some time, the order for the aircraft did not actually materialize until two years after that for the ship, when construction was well under way. The designers had made what allowances they could, but without more definite decisions, they were hamstrung.
In the spring of 1975, a young naval architect, David Andrews, joined the design team. His responsibility would be integrating the ship’s weapons systems and aircraft. As he toured her under construction in Barrow, he came across empty compartments labelled ‘Dedicated to V/STOL’, which his predecessors had set aside without really knowing what would fill them. That would be his job.
Andrews would soon discover that it was one thing to design what was essentially a helicopter carrier with a vague thought that it might one day carryV/STOL aircraft as well, but it was quite another to make it all work. It was going to be a tight squeeze. The aircraft itself was quite small. But it had to do everything the old aircraft on the previous carriers did – it was meant to be a fighter, reconnaissance aircraft, and strike plane all in one. And each job required different weapons, equipment, and support facilities. He was going to need all those empty compartments, and more.
There was, however, one beneficial side-effect to the fact that the designers’ main concerns had been to do with how to operate helicopters rather than Harriers. They had made the hangar particularly tall, so that the helicopters’ maintainers could work on the rotors and engines. As David Andrews soon found out, the fact that the Harrier had not been designed originally to go to sea presented some extra difficulties. One was that, to change an engine, the engineers had to remove the entire wing. On land, the RAF used a massive steel rig that would never fit on a ship. But, with the height available in Invincible’s hangar, David Andrews and his team were able to devise a new system that worked.
As he reflected further, Andrews also marvelled at the cleverness of the design from the naval architect’s point of view – the way his predecessors had incorporated all the different demands for the gas turbines, the ducting, the routes to move the machinery between the engineering spaces and the hangar. To him, Invincible was a mass of innovation, and it had all been neatly incorporated. The same was true of the way the crew would be accommodated, the spaces in which they would work, and how they would move about the ship. Of course, there were compromises here, too, that would lead to further grumbles. Invincible would be a labyrinth of some 800 individual compartments. But serving aboard her would be a totally different experience from that aboard the carriers of old. She would seem more like a giant frigate than the bewildering, often uncomfortable warren of a ship like Hermes.
Again, compared to the previous generations of big warships, Invincible would not have sturdy belts of armour to help protect her from damage in battle. As with the other new generations of warships that were being built, the Navy would have to think hard about how to use her in ways that did not expose her to unnecessary danger. Her key to survival in battle would chiefly be avoidance through manoeuvrability, good strategy, and destroying or decoying incoming attacks.
In fact, what had been taking shape on the stocks at Barrow-In-Furness was an undoubtedly proud-looking ship, with an exceptionally clean and modern appearance, that was also handsome, and whose coherence – like many of the best engineering designs – made her look smaller and more compact than she actually was. Except for one thing. At the bows of the ship, everything seemed to have gone horribly wrong. The flight deck stopped short of the bows and there was an open, untidy forecastle, which had the appearance more of a cargo ship than a warship, let alone a carrier.
Invincible’s construction was well under way, and she was progressing towards launch day, when the mild-mannered Arthur Honnor had joined the team as the new design project manager. As he surveyed the ship on the slipway, he asked the same question that virtually everyone did when they saw her for the first time: ‘why doesn’t she have a carrier bow?’
It is part of the mythology that has built up around Invincible and her sisters that this was an element of the disguise, to fool their opponents that they were not really carriers. Honnor suspected there was an element of that, although there were also good design reasons for doing it too. The specification for the ship required a flight deck of 550 feet, and that was achieved, without the need to extend it any further forward. In this way, it also meant that the big Sea Dart missile system could be mounted forward, with a good arc of fire, almost on the centre-line of the ship, and the standard missile magazine could be fitted without major modification. However, the plan also to fit Exocet anti-ship missiles on the forecastle alongside the Sea Dart was abandoned at the end of May 1973, just over a month after Invincible had been ordered.
Arthur Honnor had other things about which he needed to worry. The state of industrial relations and shipbuilding capacity meant Invincible was falling behind schedule. Finding enough skilled labour to complete the mass of plumbing for the ship was a major headache. The pressures on the schedule were mounting. And then another complication cropped up.
In November 1976, the Harrier’s chief designer, John Fozard, had delivered a lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society detailing studies that he and his team had been carrying out on launching a Harrier from an upward-curving ramp structure. For many in the audience, it was a revelation. For one man, though, it was a long-overdue vindication.
The ramp was already widely referred to as ‘the Ski-jump’, and it was the brainchild of a naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Doug Taylor. Taylor had joined the Navy on 1 August 1945, in the dying days of the Second World War. He had a fascination for aeroplanes that anyone who had grown up as a schoolboy in southeast England during the war would have had as they watched RAF and German pilots duelling overhead, and saw the fleets of bombers droning back and forth. But he was even more interested in big guns, so entered the Navy as an ordnance artificer apprentice. He knew little about the Fleet Air Arm, but his career would become inextricably linked with it, and especially with its survival in the business of flying fixed-wing aircraft.
Taylor came to serve in a remarkable array of Navy carriers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s – Ocean, Implacable, Glory, Eagle, Ark Royal, and Victorious. It was while aboard Victorious in 1964, when she was the mainstay of the Far East Fleet, that an incident occurred which would be one of the spurs to the creation of the Ski-jump. The ship was returning from Australia to Singapore. It was a period of particular tension in the Indonesian confrontation. As the carrier picked a careful course past Indonesia, the crew was on alert. Taylor was the flight deck engineer. There were two Sea Vixens poised on the ship’s two catapults, ready for launch, their crews roasting in the brutal heat.
On the flight deck, too, conditions were grim. And, for Taylor, there was the dawning realisation that there was a serious potential problem. Such little breeze as there was had been coming from right aft, so there would be no wind assistance for any launches. On top of that, the steam heat from the primed catapults, plus the blazing heat from the sun, meant that the steel of the flight deck had expanded, and the catapults would probably have jammed. The ship would have been defenceless. For all the talk of a carrier’s main armament being its aircraft squadrons, they were themselves totally reliant on what were, in effect, two steam cannons. And if they went wrong, any carrier would be horribly exposed and vulnerable. It certainly seemed to Taylor a lot on which to hang an entire naval strategy. This incident helped start him thinking about alternative ways to get aircraft airborne from ships at sea.
He had another, related issue on his mind. For all the attachment he had developed to naval aviation, he, like a number of others in the Navy, was increasingly concerned that the Fleet was becoming over-reliant on fewer and fewer bigger and ever more valuable ships. He came to the view that the Navy needed to get aircraft to sea in ships that not only it could afford, but also that it could afford to lose.
It was a while before all these ideas gelled together for Taylor into a coherent whole. It happened at home on Christmas leave in 1969 – the Ski-jump, the use of V/STOL aircraft, the possibility that, with a combination of the two, ships as small as frigates could take fixed-wing aircraft to sea. He put his thoughts down on paper and submitted them to his bosses. But his proposals fell on deaf ears.
One of Taylor’s superiors, however, did take note and – not without some difficulty – arranged a sabbatical for him at Southampton University to work up his ideas into something that would carry more academic respectability. His thesis duly appeared in 1973. The Ski-jump was basically the marriage of the unique design qualities of the Harrier, the laws of physics, and a simple idea. By helping to propel the V/STOL aircraft upwards on a short take-off run, the Ski-jump allowed it carry a considerable extra payload of fuel or weapons into the air for a given length of flight deck. While the basic idea was straightforward, there was a lot of complicated mathematics to back it up.
But still there was resistance. Taylor went to see John Fozard, who was polite but non-committal. It was a chance meeting with an acquaintance on Fozard’s team that led to the breakthrough. He had access to computer programmes of experimental Harrier launches from ships. Taylor’s findings were incorporated. The transformation was dramatic. The Ministry of Defence would finally authorise a set of tests from a prototype ramp built at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Bedford.
The fact was that trials of the Harrier at sea were producing some troubling results for the Navy. Rolling take-offs from the flat deck of HMS Hermes, to simulate the 550-feet run available on the new cruisers, had been showing that, in rough weather, to stay within safety limits, the Harrier would be launching with virtually no endurance or payload.
Far from eliminating the hazards of flying fixed-wing aircraft from ships, V/STOL aviation was substituting one set of problems for another. For conventional aircraft, there were the inherent risks of the shuddering and violent take-offs and landings by catapult and arrestor wire. With the Harrier, the very fact that its departure was quite leisurely in comparison was itself a major issue. From a standing start, the take-off run took ten to twelve seconds. In a rough sea, with a pitching deck, it was difficult to judge the right moment with confidence, to know that the ship and the aircraft would not be dipping dangerously towards the sea and oblivion at the critical moment. The Ski-jump appeared to add that extra margin of safety that made a vital difference.
The designers on the cruiser project were keen, therefore, to incorporate the ramp. There were discussions with the Naval Staff, and with Vickers. Arthur Honnor wrote a paper stating that the ship would not be delayed, and that there would be no increase in the overall cost, if a ramp were fitted. There were some doubts, and worries that there might be hidden costs in having to modify the aircraft. So would it really work? David Andrews was present at Bedford on 5 August 1977 when the first ever Harrier launch from a Ski-jump took place. It did work.
Invincible had already been launched herself by then, and was well on the way to completion. So only a modest seven-degree gradient of ramp could be incorporated at such a late stage in construction. It was literally just welded on to the forward end of the runway. There was, however, one happy bonus from the installation. There had been concerns that the ship would need some ballasting on the port side at around flight deck level to compensate for the weight of the superstructure to starboard. The ramp solved that problem too.
In the decade before Invincible’s launch, a profound narrowing of the Navy’s horizons appeared to have been taking place. The multiple fleets of the past had dwindled to just one. April 1967 had seen the last Commander-In-Chief South Atlantic depart. Just two months later, the Mediterranean Fleet – which had numbered Nelson himself among its historic commanders – ceased to be. The ships remaining in the Mediterranean were to come under the Commander-In-Chief of the Western Fleet, which superseded the Home Fleet – again, a historic formation which had been the Navy’s backbone in two world wars. But the Western Fleet did not last long. At the end of October 1971, the Far East Fleet was disbanded. The inevitable next step, in May 1972, was that responsibility for all of the Navy’s seagoing forces was brought under a single command, designated Commander-In-Chief, Fleet.
And yet, the Navy’s determination to maintain a presence on the wide oceans did not end there by any means. There were still token forces scattered around, including East of Suez. But, more significantly, in May 1973, a squadron of Royal Navy warships led by the cruiser, HMS Tiger, set off on a ‘group deployment’ to the Far East. Other similar deployments would follow, with the specific intention of maintaining the Navy’s expertise to operate in distant waters.
Just over a year later, Tiger’s sister ship, HMS Blake, set off at the head of another significant squadron, this time under the command of Henry Leach, now a vice admiral. In a sense, these cruisers were in their element, showing the flag in far-flung ports across the Pacific and beyond. Blake’s group, in fact, completed a circumnavigation. But Tiger and Blake were old, and showing it. Leach had to nurse his flagship along. The Navy desperately needed new ships with new capabilities, as technology and the likely threat continued to change.
But these were the years of 1970s ‘stagflation’, of desperate British economic performance and even more desperate industrial relations. Construction timetables seemed to stretch out. Costs mounted. The new ships and their weapons seemed to be taking an awful long time to materialize.
Of the other two classes of major warship besides the cruisers which had been authorised as part of the future Fleet, the destroyer had turned into the Type 42. It was deliberately a smaller and simpler ship than its predecessors, with a target displacement of some 3, 500 tons to their 6, 000 or so. Even as the Type 42’s final design was approved in November 1968, it was acknowledged that it had been drawn up within some very tight limits, with little margin for future improvements. Still, it was considered by the Admiralty Board to be a good design in the circumstances. The key to the Type 42 was its Sea Dart medium-range air defence missiles. It was critical to get these ships into the Fleet in good numbers as quickly as possible, to help fill the air defence gap that was being left by the departure of the carriers, and with the County-class destroyers and their Sea Slug missiles already looking prematurely obsolete.
The other class was meant to be a general-purpose frigate of 2, 000 to 2, 500 tons. Its job would be to replace the Leander-class frigates that were by now the backbone of the escort fleet. Virtually everybody who became anybody in the Navy of the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s commanded a Leander at some point or other. They were the best British post-war frigate design, and probably the best vessels of their type in the world at the time. They were the signature ships of the Royal Navy then. They were well-balanced and smart, with a handy gun armament, a short-range missile system, a helicopter, and a reliable power-plant. They were the true successors to the colonial cruisers of the inter-war period. Like those ships, some said the Leanders were not as well-armed as certain foreign contemporaries. But they were good enough to be able to operate independently, and cheap enough to be ordered in quantity, and therefore to help the Navy to maintain a widespread presence, again like the inter-war cruisers. Twenty-six in all were built for the Royal Navy over fourteen years.
But the Navy soon got into trouble trying to produce something better to replace them. The size and cost of what was now known as the Type 22 soon began to mushroom. In 1972, the Navy was hoping that, by the beginning of the 1980s, it would have some 20 of these ships either in service of building. That was going to prove a forlorn hope.
It also seemed as though the Naval Staff was displaying an almost exaggerated determination to emphasize the new mid-ocean anti-submarine focus of the new Fleet. So the Type 22 was designed without any main gun armament. This move also seemed to reflect a misplaced faith in some of the missile systems that the Navy was developing at the time, which saw the ships of this period – including Invincible herself – emerging with what, to the lay person, looked like very scant weaponry. One Treasury official, no doubt equating missile systems with extra cost compared to guns, bemoaned this aspect of the Type 22’s design, and how it would preclude these ships from some of the traditional applications of sea power. The Type 22 was, he argued, ‘totally incapable of firing a shot across anyone’s bows, as it might have to do in an Argentine/Falklands or Caribbean situation’. 3 That was in 1972.
This trend also led the Naval Staff to do what many regarded as unspeakable things to the Leanders themselves, ripping out their gun armament and replacing them with various types of missiles as well. There were, perhaps, good operational reasons for this – especially the desperate need to get new weapons into the Fleet. Ikara torpedo-carrying missiles were fitted to some of the class, and Exocets to others, to help fill gaps in anti-submarine and strike capabilities. But the costs – both in purely financial terms and with respect to the operational flexibility that the Navy itself argued lay at the heart of sea power – may have been too high.
But the vision remained clear. Artists’impressions in the mid-1970s showed a modern and impressive-looking Invincible thrusting through the waves, with Harriers and helicopters on her deck, and Type 42s and Type 22s powering along in company as a model Royal Navy task group of the future. Yes, the strike carriers would be gone, with the capabilities that they embodied. But this was still an attractive image, exactly as the Naval Staff envisaged it, and it seemed to enshrine a real purpose for the Fleet.
Despite the continuing economic crisis, the 1970s were largely a period of gently dwindling force levels rather than stark upheavals, as had occurred in the late 1960s. And there was the promise of considerable modernizaton of the Fleet. Given that the country, by this stage in its post-war history, seemed to be barely holding on to its national self-esteem as those around it forged ahead, the condition of the Navy could have been a lot worse.
To some extent, the pressures on the services for more cuts were relieved by the mounting concern over the advances in Soviet military capabilities. That was certainly the case for the Royal Navy, as the spectacular development of the Soviet fleet showed no signs of abating. Remarkable new warships seemed to keep appearing one after the other, bristling with weaponry and extraordinary arrays of radars. In the mid-1970s, the first grainy, snatched photographs appeared of the Soviets’ own version of the aircraft-carrying cruiser. The ship, the Kiev, at 40, 000 tons and over 900 feet in length, completely dwarfed Invincible, and cut a far more imposing dash with her towering superstructure, multiple radars, and bristling array of missiles and guns.
But while the appearance of the Kiev on the scene certainly had a huge impact, two other strands of developments were also of great concern: the quickening pace of Soviet submarine building; and the appearance of the supersonic, long-range Backfire bomber, with the ability to penetrate deep into the eastern Atlantic from its northern bases. Both the submarines and the bombers came with deadly anti-ship missiles attached.
The age of the anti-ship missile had arrived quite literally with a bang on an October evening – perhaps poignantly, on Trafalgar Day – in 1967. Cruising in the Mediterranean, a few miles north-east of Port Said, the Israeli destroyer Eilat was first crippled and then sunk by four Soviet-made Styx missiles fired from one or more Egyptian patrol boats in harbour. Of course, the fact that such weapons had been developed and were coming into service was well known. But this one event had sent shockwaves around the world.
The particular demon that concerned the Royal Navy was the Soviets’ Charlie-class submarine, which carried the supersonic SS-N-7 anti-ship missile. Crucially, the Charlie class could fire its main armament while still submerged. So these submarines could approach western task groups and fire their weapons at short range with little warning time. Studies being carried out seemed to show alarmingly low levels of survivability for surface forces that might be exposed to these threats.
The Royal Navy was just developing a new short-range, quick-reaction missile, Sea Wolf, which might be a partial solution. But it was expensive, and only the Type 22s and a handful of Leanders were scheduled to be fitted with it. The Navy talked about ‘defence in depth’, or ‘layered defence’, for its task groups, including air support from the shore, the handful of Sea Harriers that were being bought, and US Navy aircraft carriers, with stiffer defences the closer the attackers got to their target. But, for much of the Fleet, there seemed precious few of those layers, even with NATO allies to help. In one of the presentations on the layered defence concept, one naval officer boasted proudly of it as being as if the attacking Soviet forces would be moving down ‘the jaws of a crocodile’. 4 A growing band of sceptics among the Ministry of Defence’s analysts were wondering if it was not the Navy that was placing itself – or at least its surface ships – in a Soviet crocodile’s mouth.
Arthur Honnor, as head of the design team for Invincible and her sisters, was all too aware of the debates going on over new threats. He wondered whether Invincible herself was also already being overtaken by developments, at least as far as her weapons and equipment were concerned. Was Sea Dart the best defensive missile for the ship after all, especially given how big an impact it had had on the design? Suddenly, with just one missile launcher, and nothing else but a few decoy rockets, she looked terribly under-armed.
It may have been too late to do anything about Invincible for now, given that her construction was well advanced. The same was probably true also for the second ship. She had been ordered in May 1976, and – in a sign of how the political climate had relaxed in one respect at least – she had been allocated the famous carrier name Illustrious.
The planned third ship was tentatively to be called Indomitable, another name with recent carrier connotations. Maybe it was not too late to modify her so that she would be better equipped to meet the new and more challenging operational environment. In late 1976, the Naval Staff began to consider the question.
But one thing that it did not want to do was to delay her too much longer, or indeed suggest so many changes to the design that it would open the door to renewed arguments in the Ministry of Defence over whether to go ahead with her at all. There were already worries that, such was the bleakness of the economic outlook, she could be delayed by up to ten years anyway.
A working party was set up. It set itself a limit that it would not consider any modifications that would hold completion of the ship up for more than twenty-two months. But, at the same time, it had at its disposal studies that showed the scale of challenge. These suggested that a task force of half-a-dozen ships centred on a cruiser would attract considerable attention from Soviet naval air forces. The estimate was of a co-ordinated attack by Soviet bombers armed with air-to-surface missiles, arriving in three waves, with each wave launching a dozen missiles. It was judged that, with existing defences, a significant number of missiles would get past the ships’own weapons, and then it would be up to decoys and luck.
Naval officers have always maintained that, in scenarios like this, there would be many other factors at work, and that pressing home attacks on ships at sea is never as straightforward as the scientific studies suggest. They are, in that sense, very artificial scenarios. The working party pointed out that the Navy’s task forces would be operating as part of a vast network of forces. But these were still sobering statistics. It was these kinds of estimates that were reigniting a significant debate with which the Royal Navy, and indeed all major navies, was having to contend, over the whole issue of the vulnerability of surface ships in the missile age.
The working party considered a number of options for the new ship – an improved version of Sea Dart, substituting the Sea Wolf system, or even fitting both. The problem with all of these proposals was that they would delay construction by two years or more. Removing the Sea Dart, even if Sea Wolf could be fitted instead and it left room to carry an extra aircraft, was considered too high a price to pay anyway. In the end, the group concluded that the best that could be achieved in the time allowed would the fitting of a better radar.
But there were also some more positive technical developments that needed attention. The Navy was finally getting to grips with the potential of its big Sea King helicopters in the fight against submarines. But one thing that had become clear was that, to operate efficiently, they would need much larger numbers of sonobuoys – the small listening devices that they dropped into the sea in patterns to detect hidden submarines. The cruisers could do with more storage space to carry more of these. The working party recommended that as a key modification.
The whole business of anti-submarine warfare was also changing in a significant and elaborate way. The successful development of towed array sonars – long cables trailed behind frigates and fitted with complex hydrophones – promised greatly increased detection ranges. That would extend the cover that ASW task forces could provide. But the increase in the amount of information to be processed, and the greater dispersal of forces that was both possible and necessary, also greatly complicated the task of command and control. Another key improvement, therefore, was to be even better facilities for directing the battle. The Navy’s view was clearly that, while the vulnerability of these ships may have increased, so too had their value and that of the task forces that they would lead in the overall East-West maritime struggle. That, however, would not be the view of others.
The Naval Staff was also by now sufficiently enthusiastic about the Ski-jump that it wanted a bigger and better one fitted than those that could be installed in the first two ships. Other minor modifications were considered and discarded – like fitting landing craft to improve the ship’s ability to act as a Commando carrier. In March 1979, the modified design was approved. A few of the improvements would be incorporated into Illustrious while she was being built. Invincible would have to wait until her first major refit.
Things were moving. But still not as quickly as the Naval Staff would have liked. Invincible, it seemed, was going to be two years later than originally planned. The Navy was faced with what it came to call ‘the flat-top gap’. The old Ark Royal was rapidly approaching the end of her planned life. She was scheduled to retire at the end of 1978. But Invincible would not be ready by then. There was one alarming report that she might not be fully in service until 1984.
To fill the gap, the Naval Staff looked at extending Ark Royal’s life yet again. The admirals knew that any further stretching out of the career of their last traditional aircraft carrier would be politically sensitive, not least with the RAF, which was already waiting to take over her aircraft. There was thought given to her operating in a reduced carrier role, keeping her Phantom fighters, but having Harriers instead of Buccaneers. Or maybe she could carry just Harriers and helicopters, in the same way as the new cruisers.
But then the alarm bells began to ring. Ark Royal would need a refit to keep her going. The Treasury suggested that, if that were the case, with the economy in such a bad state, the only way for this option to make sense would be if Ark Royal were to be kept going for some time and the third cruiser deferred indefinitely. The Navy did not like that. Ark Royal was also very manpower intensive, at a time when the Navy was beginning to suffer even more chronic personnel shortages. The Naval Staff decided against keeping her going. Instead, another old but smaller ship, the Commando carrier HMS Bulwark, which had just been put in reserve, would be brought back into operation as an anti-submarine helicopter carrier.
That was not quite the end of the story for Ark Royal. In early 1978, in her last year of operational service, NATO’s supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, SACLANT, US Admiral Isaac Kidd Jr, approached the First Sea Lord, who was now Admiral Sir Terence Lewin. He was anxious about what he saw as a shortfall in Western carrier forces in the Atlantic. Was there any chance, he asked, that HMS Ark Royal could be kept in service? It was a reflection of the importance the Americans placed on carrier forces in the Atlantic, but also of the value they placed on the British ship.
Once again, Britain’s chiefs of staff looked at the question, but decided that it was just not on. Ark Royal had never been modernized to the same extent as her sister, Eagle, apart from her ability to operate Phantoms. She had an antique operations room. And, with a crew requirement of 2, 600, it would probably have required the paying off of two destroyers, the cruiser Blake, and two or more frigates to keep her going. Lewin replied to Kidd that, regretfully, after careful consideration, the Ministry of Defence could not agree to the request. ‘Frankly,’ he said ‘as far as organic air is concerned, we are going full ahead for V/STOL, and hope to help you plug the gap with these aircraft before too long’. 5
Clearly, in the circumstances, it did not make any sense to keep Ark Royal plodding on any longer. But the American approach was perhaps a reminder of how things might have been different. A British fleet based on a couple of full-size aircraft carriers might have made a difference in NATO, when the Americans were feeling the pressure of global overstretch themselves. An extra carrier would have been a significant part of the NATO maritime whole.
So it was then that, on 4 December 1978, on a tranquil morning, the last of Britain’s conventional aircraft carriers slipped into Plymouth Sound for her final homecoming. She was a tired ship, and she looked her age. But she still had a rugged and imposing presence. And, like many great ships, she seemed to have acquired a real character, and had certainly attracted great affection. Her name, however, would live on. In naval terms, it was a name that was far more ancient than Invincible’s, with battle honours that stretched back to The Armada. But, in modern times, it had been more associated than any other with the business of carrying aircraft to sea. It was announced that the third new cruiser, which was to have been named Indomitable, would in fact be the fifth Ark Royal.
Three-and-a-half months later, on 20 March 1979, far to the north at Barrow-In-Furness, Captain Michael Howard Livesay joined his new ship, Invincible. He was thrilled, certainly, at this opportunity, but also fully conscious of the challenges, complexities, and responsibilities that lay ahead.
Michael Livesay had joined Dartmouth Royal Naval College in 1952 at the age of 16. He eventually qualified as a fighter direction and radar specialist. He served in a destroyer and the carrier Hermes. His first commands were the mine-hunter Hubbertson and the frigate Plymouth. Just before being appointed to Invincible, he worked on the Naval Staff in the Ministry of Defence, and was heavily involved in a joint project with the US Navy on a new concept of maritime operations to support NATO. He was clearly destined for great things. And yet he told his wife that, while delighted, he was surprised to have been given Invincible as a command.
But he had little time to reflect. Less than a week after he arrived, the ship went to sea for the first time to begin her builder’s sea trials. She headed to Greenock. She was in dry dock there over the Easter weekend. On the Saturday, one of the engineering officers, Lieutenant Michael Price, picked up a signal from the Ministry of Defence in London. It announced that the ship’s visual recognition sign would be R05 – not the traditional ‘C’ prefix for a cruiser, but ‘R’. Price called the second-in-command, Dermot Rhodes, and asked him to pass the news on to the Captain. Invincible was officially an aircraft carrier at last.