World War: Where Is the Ark Royal?

The boys on the aircraft carrier Ark Royal (who, depending on their mood, called her the Ark or My Royal Arse) had begun to think of her as charmed; the Axis claimed her sinking again & again, but apparently nothing could get her.

First the Germans said (Sept. 26, 1939) that they had bombed her to the bottom of the North Sea. She was in the North Sea, but unhurt.

“Where is the Ark Royal?” asked the Berlin radio over & over. She was heading south for Cape Town.

In Berlin the Luftwaffe’s Lance Corporal Fran eke received the Iron Cross for sinking her. She was then about to help track down the Admiral Graf Spee off South America.

On July 10, 1941, the Italians said they had sunk her with air bombs off the Balearic Islands. She had just come to the Mediterranean, but was unhurt.

On Oct. 6, 1941, the Italians said she had limped into Gibraltar at reduced speed after having been gravely damaged by a torpedo.

London said: “The Italians, having sunk the Ark Royal so many times, must be getting short of real information.”

As she steamed along in a convoy last week, her 65,000 square feet of flight deck glistening under the Mediterranean sun, she seemed unsinkable. Men on the off watch were washing up for tea. Suddenly there was a crash amidships to starboard; all over the ship the lights went out. Every man knew that the Ark’s luck-insurance had lapsed. A torpedo had found her.

As calmly (said one survivor) “as though going down a gangway at Gibraltar,” the crew took up their lifebelts and filed above. On a ladder a rating said to an officer: “Damned hard luck on the old lady, sir.” The officer patted the sailor’s shoulder.

The Ark began to list alarmingly to starboard—”at an angle suggesting a motor car with both wheels on one side off.” On the flight and hangar decks mechanics and pilots worked frantically in an effort to launch the ship’s planes, 60 Swordfish torpedo-carriers and Skua dive-bombers.

The loudspeakers barked: “Everybody to the port side. . . . Prepare to abandon ship.” But at the boat stations on the weather deck it was obvious that the motor lifeboats could never be launched because of the heavy list. A destroyer worked up under the overhanging lee deck. Ropes shot up and were made fast. The men, some in overalls, some in underwear, slid down like monkeys to the destroyer’s fo’c’sle deck.

The Ark seemed to steady somewhat. Captain L. E. H. Maund, C.B.E., a few senior officers and a picked skeleton crew stayed aboard. Two hours later the men on the destroyer cheered when they heard an order for all rescued members of the engine-room crew to return to the Ark.

Engineers, electricians, stokers and water tenders clambered aboard. They made fast tow lines from tugs out of Gibraltar.

The switchboard was in smithereens, but with the help of portable apparatus they got generators going. They started the pumps, but the Ark was shipping water fast. They even managed to raise a head of steam but soon the gauges fell, the lights dimmed. It was hopeless. Captain Maund gave the final order to abandon ship.

Not many hours later the men of the Ark learned that the big girl, top-heavy with her thick deck armor, had rolled over on her back, lifted herself a bit by the stern, like some great animal making a last stab at survival, then plunged. The men were heartbroken, not over the fact, inconsequential to most of them, that Britain’s third carrier loss* left the Royal Navy only nine of these invaluable craft, but simply because their invulnerable, incomparable Ark was gone.

They had three consolations. Only one of Ark’s 1,575 officers and men was lost. After all the Axis claims, the Ark’s loss was announced to the world, not by the Axis but by the British Admiralty. And she had been sunk by a U-boat,† had not suffered the final indignity of being sunk by an Italian submarine.

But consolations were not enough. Old Unsinkable was sunk.

*Others: Courageous, Glorious.

†The Germans said their subs had not only sunk the Ark, but had damaged the Malaya, back from a three-month convalescence in Brooklyn Navy Yard.