On the afternoon of 8 June 1940, HMS Glorious, a 22,500-ton fleet carrier, was steaming for Scapa Flow with two destroyers and not a single plane in the air. No fighters on patrol. No scouts ahead. The lookouts were the only thing watching the horizon.
The men who later pieced the day together believed she was in that state because her captain was in a hurry to get to a court-martial.
The captain
Captain Guy D’Oyly-Hughes had been a genuine hero of the First World War. As second-in-command of the submarine HMS E11 in the Dardanelles, on 21 August 1915 he swam ashore with a load of explosives and blew up part of the Constantinople-Baghdad railway. He won the DSC for it, and later the DSO and Bar. He was 24.
In June 1939 he was given HMS Glorious.
He was a submariner by trade. He had served ten months as executive officer of the carrier Courageous and had learned to fly, but he kept overruling the professional aviators on board.
The feud
Glorious carried a Commander (Air), J. B. Heath, whose job was to run the air group. Heath was a career aviator.
D’Oyly-Hughes wanted the air group to strike targets ashore in Norway. Heath refused, arguing his aircraft were not suited to the job. The captain had him put ashore at Scapa Flow to await court-martial.
The detachment
In the early hours of 8 June, Glorious was part of the force covering the evacuation from Narvik. D’Oyly-Hughes asked permission to detach and steam ahead independently to Scapa Flow. The official reason was fuel. When Captain Stephen Roskill, the official historian of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, researched the sinking in 1980, retired officers told him the real problem was the captain’s impatience for the court-martial.
Permission was granted. Glorious left with two destroyers, HMS Ardent and HMS Acasta, the latter under Commander Charles Glasfurd. She made 17 or 18 knots with some of her boilers shut down.
The intercept
At 15:45, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sighted her smoke and gave chase. Each carried nine 28 cm guns.
Glorious had no air patrol flying. Her hangar held RAF Hurricanes and Gladiators flown aboard from Norway the day before. Their pilots had landed fighters with no arrester hooks on a carrier deck to save the aircraft, something nobody had tried before.
At 16:32, Scharnhorst opened fire at about 28,600 yards. Six minutes later, on her third salvo, she hit Glorious at roughly 26,500 yards (about 24,200 metres). The shell burst in the hangar, wrecked the aircraft on deck and ended any chance of a launch. It is tied with HMS Warspite’s hit on Giulio Cesare as the longest-range gunfire hit ever made on a moving warship.
The destroyers
HMS Ardent went first. She laid smoke, fired her torpedoes and was smashed by the German guns. She sank at 17:25 with 152 of her crew.
HMS Acasta came in next. Glasfurd ran in behind the smoke and fired his torpedoes at close range. At 17:34 one of the four from his second attack hit Scharnhorst, tearing a hole of about 14 by 6 metres in her side. Some 2,500 tons of water flooded in, the after turret was knocked out and 48 Germans died. The battleship broke off for Trondheim.
Acasta sank stern first around 18:20, taking 160 men with her. Leading Seaman C. G. Carter was her only survivor.
The men in the water
Glorious sank at 18:10.
The men who got off her drifted for days in the Norwegian Sea. The Norwegian ship Borgund, bound for the Faroes, picked up survivors and landed 37 alive at Tórshavn. Two of them later died. Other Norwegian boats found a handful more, for about 40 survivors in all.
Three British ships had gone down. 1,519 men were dead: 1,207 from Glorious, 160 from Acasta, 152 from Ardent. 112 of them were Royal Marines.
D’Oyly-Hughes went down with his ship.
The questions
With the captain dead, the court-martial of Commander Heath never took place.
The fuel explanation stood for decades. Roskill poured scorn on it in 1980. Later, after Bletchley Park became public, it emerged that its Naval Section had warned of German warships breaking out, but the Operational Intelligence Centre disagreed with the reading and the Home Fleet was never told.
What’s still there
The wreck of HMS Glorious has never been found. Acasta and Ardent lie somewhere near her.
The names of the dead are on the Plymouth, Portsmouth and Chatham Naval Memorials, according to each man’s home port.
Scharnhorst was repaired and sent back to sea. On 26 December 1943, off the North Cape, HMS Duke of York and her escorts sank her. 1,932 Germans died. 36 survived. These were the same Arctic waters that saw the loss of HMS Edinburgh and her cargo of gold and the Battle of the Barents Sea.
Her wreck was found in 2000 by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, upside down at about 290 metres.
