HMS Furious was a modified built for the Royal Navy (RN) during the First World War. Designed to support the Baltic Project championed by the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, the ship was very lightly armoured and designed with a main battery of only two 18-inch (457 mm) guns. Furious was modified as an aircraft carrier while under construction. Her forward turret was removed and a flight deck was added in its place, such that aircraft had to manoeuvre around the superstructure to land. Later in the war, the ship had her rear turret removed and a second flight deck installed aft of the superstructure, but this was less than satisfactory due to air turbulence. Furious was briefly laid up after the war before she was reconstructed with a full-length flight deck in the early 1920s. Her half-sisters and were also rebuilt as aircraft carriers around that time.
After her conversion, Furious was used extensively for trials of naval aircraft, and later as a training ship once large, modern fleet carriers such as entered service in the 1930s. During the early months of the Second World War, the carrier spent her time hunting for German raiders in the North Atlantic and escorting convoys. This changed dramatically during the Norwegian Campaign in early 1940, when her aircraft provided air support to British troops ashore in addition to attacking German shipping. The first of what would be numerous aircraft ferry missions was made by the carrier during the campaign. After the withdrawal of British troops in May, Furious made several anti-shipping strikes in Norway with little result before beginning a steady routine of ferrying aircraft for the Royal Air Force.
At first, Furious made several trips to West Africa, but she began to ferry aircraft to Gibraltar in 1941. An unsuccessful attack on German-occupied ports on the Arctic Ocean interrupted the ferry missions in mid-1941. Furious was given a lengthy refit in the United States and spent a few months training after her return in April 1942. She made several more ferry trips in mid-1942 before her aircraft attacked airfields in Vichy French Algeria as part of the opening stages of Operation Torch in November 1942. The ship remained in the Mediterranean until February 1943 when she was transferred to the Home Fleet.
Furious spent most of 1943 training, but made a number of attacks on the and other targets in Norway during the first half of 1944. By September 1944, the ship was showing her age and she was placed in reserve. Furious was decommissioned in April 1945, but was not sold for scrap until 1948.
Design and description During the First World War, Admiral Fisher was prevented from ordering an improved version of the preceding s by a wartime restriction that banned construction of ships larger than light cruisers. To obtain ships suitable for traditional battlecruiser roles, such as scouting for fleets and hunting enemy raiders, he settled on ships with the minimal armour of a light cruiser and the armament of a battlecruiser. He justified their existence by claiming he needed fast, shallow-draught ships for his Baltic Project, a plan to invade Germany via its Baltic coast.Burt 1986, p. 303Roberts, pp. 50–51
Furious had an overall length of , a beam of , and a draught of at deep load. She displaced normally and at deep load. She had a metacentric height of at deep load.Roberts, pp. 64–65 Furious and her half-sisters were the first large warships in the Royal Navy to have geared steam turbines. To save design time, the installation used in the light cruiser , the first cruiser in the RN with geared turbines, was copied and simply duplicated to provide two sets of turbines. The four Brown-Curtis turbines were powered by eighteen Yarrow small-tube boilers that were designed to produce a total of . The ship's speed was an estimated , but she never ran her sea trials.Roberts, pp. 71, 76, 79
Furious was designed to normally carry of fuel oil, but could carry a maximum of . At full capacity, she could steam for an estimated at a speed of .Burt 1986, p. 306 The ship was designed to carry two BL 18-inch Mark I guns in two single turrets, one each fore ('A') and aft ('Y'). Her secondary armament consisted of 11 BL Mk I guns. A pair of quick-firing (QF) 3-inch (76 mm) 20 cwt"Cwt" is the abbreviation for hundredweight, 20 cwt referring to the weight of the gun. anti-aircraft guns were mounted before the funnel. Furious was also fitted with two submerged tubes for torpedoes for which 10 torpedoes were carried.
Even as she was being built, Furious was modified with a large hangar capable of housing ten aircraft on her forecastle that replaced the forward turret. A 160-foot (49 m) flight deck was built along its roof. Aircraft were flown off and, rather less successfully, landed on this deck. Floatplanes like the Short Type 184 used a four-wheel trolley that ran down a track along the centre of the flight deck for take-off. Aircraft were lifted by crane from the hangar to the flight deck. Although the aft turret was fitted and the gun tested, it was not long before Furious returned to her builders for further modifications. In November 1917, the rear turret was replaced by a 300-foot (91 m) deck for landing aircraft over another hangar.Parkes, p. 622 Her funnel and superstructure remained intact, with a narrow strip of decking around them to connect the fore and aft flight decks.Burt 1986, p. 314 Turbulence from the funnel and superstructure was severe enough that only three landing attempts were successful before further attempts were forbidden.Parkes, p. 624 Her 18-inch guns were reused on the s and during the war.Buxton, p. 73
Furious was laid down on 8 June 1915 at Armstrong Whitworth's Low Walker shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne. The ship was launched on 18 August 1916 and commissioned on 26 June 1917.Jenkins, p. 251 As completed, her complement numbered 737 officers and ratings.Burt 1986, p. 307
Aircraft landing and the First World War
On 2 August 1917, while performing trials, Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning landed a Sopwith Pup on Furious, becoming the first person to land an aircraft on a moving ship. On 7 August, he made another landing in the same manner, but on his third attempt the engine choked and the aircraft crashed off the starboard bow into the sea. Knocked unconscious, he drowned in the cockpit. The deck arrangement was unsatisfactory because aircraft had to manoeuvre around the superstructure to land.Bruce, p. 204 Dunning's replacement as the head of Furious air group, Frederick Rutland, performed a landing in the same manner as Dunning, after which he stopped these experiments, reporting to the Admiralty that the average lifespan of a pilot making a landing like this would be ten landings, in good weather.Young, 30–32
The three Courageous-class ships were assigned to the 1st Cruiser Squadron (CS) in October 1917 when the Admiralty received word of German ship movements on 16 October, possibly indicating a raid. Admiral David Beatty, commander of the Grand Fleet, ordered most of his light cruisers and destroyers to sea to locate the enemy ships. Furious was detached from the 1st CS and ordered to sweep along the 56th parallel as far as 4° East and to return before dark. and were sent to reinforce the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron patrolling the central part of the North Sea later that day.Newbolt, pp. 150–151 Two German light cruisers managed to slip through the gaps in the British patrols and destroyed the Scandinavia convoy during the morning of 17 October, but no word was received of the engagement until that afternoon. The 1st CS was ordered to intercept the German ships, but they proved to be faster than expected and the British ships were unsuccessful.Newbolt, pp. 156–157
Furious returned to the dockyard in November to have the aft turret removed and replaced by another deck for landing, giving her both a launching and a recovery deck. Two lifts (elevators) serving the hangars were also installed. Furious was recommissioned on 15 March 1918, and her embarked aircraft were used on anti-Zeppelin patrols in the North Sea after May. In July 1918, she flew off seven Sopwith Camels which participated in the Tondern raid, attacking the Zeppelin sheds there with moderate success.Newbolt, p. 347
Conversion
Overview Furious was laid up after the war, but was converted to an aircraft carrier with a continuous flight deck between June 1921 and September 1925. Her design was based on experience gained with the first two British carriers, and ,Burt 1993, pp. 258–263 although this was very limited as Argus was less than three years oldBurt 1993, p. 248 and Eagle had carried out only 143 deck landings during her preliminary sea trials in 1920.Brown, p. 252
The ship's superstructure, masts, funnel and landing deck were removed and she was given a flight deck that extended over three-quarters of her length. This flight deck was not level; it sloped upwards about three-quarters of the way from the stern to help slow down landing aircraft, which had no brakes at that time. The fore-and-aft arresting gear was not intended to stop landing aircraft—the landing speeds of the time were low enough that this was unnecessary given a good headwind—but rather to prevent aircraft from veering off to one side and potentially falling off the flight deck. Various designs for the flight deck were tested in a wind tunnel by the National Physical Laboratory which showed that the distinctive elliptical shape and rounded edges used minimised turbulence.Burt 1993, pp. 259, 262
Furious was not lengthened, but her beam was increased to Jenkins, front endpaper and her average draught was now at deep load, deeper than before the conversion. She displaced at normal load and at deep load, over 3000 long tons more than her previous displacement. Her metacentric height was at deep load, a reduction of after her conversion.Burt 1993, p. 269 During the ship's post-conversion sea trials she reached .Jenkins, p. 269 Her fuel capacity was increased by during her reconstruction, which increased her range to at a speed of Friedman, p. 95 or at a speed of .Friedman, p. 363
A two-level hangar was built under the flight deck, in height per level. The lower hangar was long by wide and the upper was . Each hangar could be sectioned off by electrically operated steel shutters on rollers. Her boilers were ducted down the side of the ship to exhaust either out of gratings at the rear of the flight deck or, when landing operations were in progress, out of the side of the lower hangar at the rear of the ship. This solution proved to be very unsatisfactory as it consumed valuable space, made parts of the lower hangar unbearable and interfered with landing operations to a greater or lesser degree. Her original flying-off deck remained in place for use by small aircraft like fighters which improved launch and recovery cycle flexibility allowing the ship to simultaneously land aircraft on the main flight deck while fighters were taking off on the lower deck or to speedily fly off her aircraft from both decks.Brown, p. 2 Doors at the forward end of the upper hangar opened onto the lower flying deck. Like Argus, Furious was flush-decked and lacked an island superstructure to minimise any turbulence over the flight deck; instead she had a navigating position at the leading edge of the flight deck, starboard, and was provided with a retractable charthouse forward, on the flight deck centreline.Burt 1993, pp. 258–259, 262–263Chesneau, pp. 85–88 The ship could normally carry about 36 aircraft.
Two lifts (elevators) were installed to transfer aircraft between the flight deck and hangars. No arresting gear was fitted and two ready-use petrol tanks were provided for aircraft and the ship's boats on the upper deck. An additional of petrol were in bulk storage. In 1939, her complement consisted of 41 officers and 754 crewmen.Friedman, pp. 94–95, 366
Armament