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THE INGLORIOUS END OF THEGLORIOUS: The Release ofthe Findings of the Board ofEnquiry into the loss of HMSGloriousJames Levy Ph.D. a ba University of Wales , Swanseab New College, Hofstra UniversityPublished online: 22 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: James Levy Ph.D. (2000) THE INGLORIOUS END OF THE GLORIOUS:The Release of the Findings of the Board of Enquiry into the loss of HMS Glorious , TheMariner's Mirror, 86:3, 302-309, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2000.10659249

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302 The Mariner's Mirror Vol. 86 No. 3 (August 2000), 302-309

THE INGLORIOUS END OF THE GLORIOUS: The Release of the Findings of the Board of Enquiry into

the loss of HMS Glorious

By James Levy

I n his fine account of the life and death of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, John Winton laments that the full account of the Board of Enquiry into the loss of that ship had never been released. 1 Long a topic of speculation, it has always been hoped

that this document, jealously guarded by the Admiralty since 1940, might one day be available to historians anxious to determine exactly how and why the Glorious, sailing in company with the destroyers Ardent and Acasta, was surprised and sunk by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway on 8 June 1940. This naval disaster was so atypical of the Second World War- the Glorious was the only fleet carrier sunk in a surface action- that some accounting for the anomaly has always seemed an important historical exercise. New documentation discovered at the Public Record Office at Kew, London, helps shed light on the loss of the Glorious and her companions. This article will look at the mystery surrounding the loss of Glorious, what we know about the battle in which she was lost, and recent documentation which reinforces certain conclusions historians have drawn about the battle. Although many of the issues discussed below have been inferred, implied, and otherwise posited before based on the then available sources, the Findings of the Board of Enquiry provide new and powerful documentation in support of this earlier work. Moreover, this article will address what we still do not know about the incident, how certain mysteries may never be resolved.

The heart of the mystery of why the Glorious, Ardent, and A casta were sunk lies in the personality and temperament of one man- Guy D'Oyly-Hughes, captain of the Glorious. D'Oyly-Hughes2 had a well-deserved reputation as a brave, tough fighting officer. Born in 1891, he had served in submarines during the First World War and won both a DSO and DSC for his efforts. D'Oyly-Hughes later was assigned to the staff of the Atlantic Fleet, and got a strong recommendation in his service record from Captain (later Admiral) Drax in 1921. Serving once again with the submarines, D'Oyly-Hughes was involved in a collision between his boat Oberon and her sister-ship Oxley in 1928, but got off with only a warning, implying that he had a good reputation and, perhaps, friends in high places. As commander of the 1st Submarine Flotilla in the Mediterranean he was mentioned in the dispatch on the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935-6 by the fleet commander, Admiral Sir William Fisher, for his exceptional service, and went on to the Imperial Defence College in 1938. Then, with war on the horizon, D'Oyly-Hughes was given the captaincy of the Glorious (22,000 tons, forty-eight aircraft), one of the Royal Navy's four large fleet carriers, in June 1939.

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ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS 303

While in command of the Glorious, D'Oyly-Hughes began to show signs of a growing irritability which seem to have manifested itself, as John Winton has pointed out, in an unbalanced mental state.3 The assessment of him by his critics is best exemplified in this quote from Correlli Barnett:4

Guy D'Oyly Hughes was a throwback to the worst kind of arrogant, authoritarian, and choleric Edwardian naval officer. In the words of one former Fleet Air Arm subordinate, ' ... D-H was a very vain man and would not admit his ignorance on air matters and tried to enforce his view by bullying and bluster'.

However, among certain 'offensive-minded' senior officers at the time D'Oyly-Hughes enjoyed a splendid reputation. Drax always thought well of him, even after his ship was sunk. Admiral Dunbar-Nasmith wrote a glowing letter in memoriam to The Times, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes referred to him in death as a 'splendid fellow' and a 'scapegoat'.5

If the first half of all true tragedies begins with hubris, then that of the loss of the Glorious begins with the quarrel between D'Oyly-Hughes and his air officers.6 During operations off the coast of Norway, in the last days before the eventual evacuation of Narvik, the Glorious was flying support missions for the Army. A growing dispute over the efficacy of these missions, specifically over the increasing intervention of Luftwaffe fighters and what could be accomplished by Swordfish bi-planes in their presence, led to a break between D'Oyly-Hughes and his Commander (Air),J .B. Heath. The argument became so heated that D'Oyly-Hughes had his senior Fleet Air Arm officer arrested, and threatened another air officer likewise. He landed his Commander (Air) on 31 May at Scapa Flow, then set off on an emergency mission to cover the evacuation of Narvik.

After completing the not insignificant achievement of flying onto his carrier ten Gladiators and ten Hurricanes of the RAF which had been operating from an aidield in Norway, planes piloted by men who had never made a deck landing, D'Oyly-Hughes started the tragedy hurtling towards nemesis? At that time the Glorious was operating in concert with the Ark Royal under the Home Fleet's Vice-Admiral Commanding Aircraft Carriers, Lionel Wells. They were covering the troop transports carrying off the forces at Narvik, under an umbrella of tight security. After flying on his orphan charges, D'Oyly-Hughes asked for, and got, permission to sail independently, with only a two-destroyer escort, to Scapa Flow in order to expedite the court martial of Heath. Such behaviour in wartime was inexcusable. D'Oyly-Hughes had no right asking to leave the convoy, and Wells no business giving him such permission. From this point, the errors which lead to the impending disaster seem to have accumulated and compounded.

Our understanding of the battle in which the Glorious was sunk (a battle, interestingly enough, which has no name) is based on three major sources: the Home Fleet War Diaries contained in Adm. 199/393; the German account compiled by the Naval Staff after the war as Adm. 234/427; and the accounts of survivors. These are the elements which Stephen Roskill used to put together the battle narrative in the Official History.8 John Winton did an excellent job of mining the available primary and secondary material for his description of the battle in his book Carrier Glorious.9

Initially, the Glorious, Ardent, and A casta were making a beeline for Scapa in warm,

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304 ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS

sunny, perfectly clear weather when, at about 16:46 (that is, by the German clocks, the British were one hour behind) on 8 June 1940, a lookout on the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst (nine 11-inch guns, 32,000 tons) sighted smoke on the horizon and, with her sister-ship, the Gneisenau, altered course to investigate. About ten minutes later the smoke was seen to be a British aircraft carrier with two small ships in attendance. The Germans, who sensed an evacuation of N arvik coming and needed to take pressure off their own land forces until it could come, sent out their battlecruisers on Operation Juno to intercept shipping between Britain and Narvik. When the Glorious came within maximum range of the German guns (28,000 yards) at about 17:30, they opened fire and managed to straddle on their third salvo. Belatedly, D'Oyly-Hughes attempted to get a torpedo striking force lined up on deck while his destroyers made smoke and tried to distract the enemy. Amazingly, he had flown off no reconnaissance aircraft that day or combat air patroP0 and was taken entirely by surprise! We know that the Glorious tried to send a distress signal, but it was not properly received (or at least understood) by any ship or station.11 In a fierce running battle the flight deck was pierced, the bridge destroyed, D'Oyly-Hughes killed, and the ship engulfed in flames. At 18:20 the Glorious was ordered abandoned; at some time between 18:30 and 18:40 she sank. Meanwhile, her destroyers were putting up an epic fight, trying to divert the fire of the German battlecruisers. The Acasta managed to hit the Scharnhorst with one of her torpedoes before she went down. The Ardent, a German eyewitness later recounted, 'fought with outstanding resolution', her bow 4.7-inch guns firing as the ship sank around their crews.12 The battle was over, leaving many hundreds of British sailors and airmen in the water, and hundreds more dead. All told, 1,519 men of the crews of the Ardent, Acasta, and Glorious died in the battle or from wounds and exposure in its aftermath as they awaited a rescue delayed by the failure of the distress signal and the secrecy and enforced radio silence enshrouding the evacuation of Narvik. Only forty-six men survived the ordeal.

Within days of the news of the disaster a Board of Enquiry was convened under Vice-Admiral C. Ramsay, Commander-in-Chief, Rosyth. He delegated the work of interviewing survivors and collecting the facts of the incident to Captain Cyril Benson and Commander J.E. Broome, both of his staff. Their Findings, now designated Adm. 178/201, and stamped 'Not to be Released Until 2042', was released, by a special Instrument of the Lord Chancellor, Britain's highest judicial official, on 10 December 1993.13 In it are minutes, including those of the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, and Second Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Charles Little, a summary of the Findings of the Board, and a series of interview transcripts from survivors.

The survivor accounts make for fascinating, and terrifying, reading. Commander Broome summarised the survivor interviews about the battle and discovered that they were almost all sure that the Glorious was attacked by a 'Hipper' class heavy cruiser and a 'Leipzig' class light cruiser. We know, of course, that they were wrong; only Petty Officer George W. Elliot rightly identified one of the attacking ships as the Scharnhorst. 14The times of the various details of the engagement given by the survivors dovetail fairly well with those given in the German accounts contained in Adm. 234/427. All agreed that visibility was, as Broome put it, 'maximum'. The impression Broome got was that the first salvo which struck the Glorious pierced the flight deck and

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ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS 305

exploded in the upper hangar, starting a fire. The next hit knocked out the homing beacon and the bridge, killing D'Oyly-Hughes. An order to abandon ship was given at about 17:20 (18:20 by German clocks) and the ship went down around 17:40. Lieutenant-Commander R.C. Hill in his testimony to the Board stated that when the ship went down the men 'were calm and collected and there was no panic'.15

Despite the pounding she took, the survivors of the Glorious noted many, probably several hundred, officers and men had got off the stricken ship and into the water. Most who could, lashed themselves to the carley floats (wood, canvas, and rope life-rafts) in hope of rescue from the icy water. Most who made it were picked up four days later. The survivors were asked about how many men made it onto their float, and how many of these were rescued. The numbers below speak for themselves: 16

On float Survived Corporal C.R. Etheridge, RM 25 5 Engineer Rating G.R. Fern 22 4 P.O. Richard Leggott 23 2 Flight Lieutenant Jameson 29 or 30 5 Squadron Leader Cross 29 6

As for the reason why so many men had to face death on open car ley floats in Arctic waters, some of the answers quickly emerged during the investigation. First, as we have known for many years, no reconnaissance flights were flown on 8 June. By order of the Captain, the five serviceable Swordfish torpedo bombers aboard were at ten minutes' notice for action. As Sub-Lieutenant (A) I.M. Maclachlan of 823 Squadron stated in his testimony, 'This is the longest notice at which we have been - We are usually at immediate notice'Y Perhaps D'Oyly-Hughes was in such a hurry he did not wish to take the time to turn his ship into the wind to launch his planes for reconnaissance; but why was there no strike force available, just in case? As for why that strike was never able to launch, evidence suggests that the Swordfish were ranged on deck, but the fire in the upper hangar isolated the torpedo magazine and made it impossible to arm the aircraft. 18 In addition, there was '[n]o lookout in [the] Crows [sic] nest in condition of extreme visibility'.19 Obviously, D'Oyly-Hughes had failed in his primary responsibility of making his ship combat ready, no matter what vehement defence, especially from his family,20 may be made on his behalf.

But what of the distress signal? We have evidence from one of the Swordfish pilots ranged on the Glorious's deck that such a message was sent, using the low gain transmitter.21 Why the low gain transmitter? No answer is given. Historians have known that the heavy cruiser Devonshire picked up part of a message from the Glorious, but the commander of 1st Cruiser Squadron who was aboard her, Vice-AdmiralJ.H.D. Cunningham, always maintained that the transmission was garbled and therefore kept the required radio silence. We know now that the battleship Valiant also received a garbled message from the Glorious, a copy of which with the words 'Reception VERY DOUBTFUL' typed on it can be found in Adm. 178/201. So it is reasonable to believe that Vice-Admiral Cunningham also received a corrupted message. The reason why the message was so hard to read and was not picked up by more stations is partially explained by a letter of 21 November 1940 by the Director of the Signal Division. The author of the letter determined that the Glorious was transmitting on the old Narvik WIT frequency- she had not yet passed the line 65 degrees north which separated that

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306 ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS

signals regime from the frequencies used nearer the British Isles. Therefore, very few ships were listening in on the frequency the distress signal was sent on. This 'explains why this wave was used for the mutilated report received by C.S. One [Cunningham]' ,22

The actual summary of the Findings of the Board are presented here, and put to rest any reasoned defence of D'Oyly-Hughes:23

The Board of Enquiry has elicited the following facts:

(1) There were 5 T.S.R. [Swordfish] on board which might have been used for reconnaissance, but none was in the air for twelve hours prior to, or during, the action

(2) There was a lack of proper look-out on board, and of precautions generally against a possible surface attack

(3) Before the action began the only shell at the guns was for anti-aircraft attack (4) All the boilers were not connected up

The First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, was shocked by the results of the Board. He minuted Sir Charles Little, the Second Sea Lord, asking if some surviving officers should be court-martialled for negligence. Little did not think so, nor did the officers of the Board of Enquiry. Pound eventually concurred, but his final minute of 7 August 1940 must be quoted at length:24

I agree [with the Board of Enquiry] that a Court-Martial should not be held as the commanding officer did not survive. The lack of readiness for action as shown at A [site of the battle] is deplorable and knowing Captain D'Oyly-Hughes and his fine record Glorious [sic] had through­out her commission I cannot understand it. They [Glorious] were being used as a transport and seem to have forgotten they were a man o' war. I hope the gallant conduct of Ardent and Acasta will be [suitably? illegible] rewarded.

The implication was clear: if D'Oyly-Hughes had survived, he would have been court-martialled for the manner in which he lost his ship. Thanks to confirmation and elaboration from German records and accounts, the heroic action of the Ardent and Acasta in charging the enemy battlecruisers has not been lost to history. Their brave attack goes some way towards repairing the reputation of the Royal Navy damaged by D'Oyly-Hughes's incompetence. Pound's incredulity is understandable. The mystery of how an experienced and well-considered officer could make such blunders is real and illusive. Admiral Ramsay, who headed the Board of Enquiry, wrote to the Home Fleet's commander, Sir Charles Forbes, that 'Glorious appears to have been caught unprepared ... no evidence has been obtained as to why this state of affairs existed'.25

This basic mystery, the 'why', remains locked in the psyche of D'Oyly-Hughes, and his death forever closed off any avenue historians might have to explain the mystery. We now have a better idea of what D'Oyly-Hughes did, but why he committed the blunders he did will most likely forever remain unknown.

Based on the objective facts of the case, we can now say with little chance of contradiction that Guy D'Oyly-Hughes was culpably negligent in the handling of his ship on 8 June 1940. Simply put, the Glorious was not a combat ready unit and was caught and sunk along with the Ardent and Acasta because Captain D'Oyly-Hughes failed to fly reconnaissance missions, failed to have a lookout in the crow's nest, and failed to have a striking force at the ready. In addition, he had made an unnecessary and unreasonable request to depart his convoy. D'Oyly-Hughes was not helped by the secrecy surrounding the evacuation of Narvik, secrecy which involved Coastal Command being kept in the dark so that no additional land-based reconnaissance

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ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS 307

sorties were flown which might have sighted the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau before they could blow the Glorious out of the water.26

The Board of Enquiry finished its work, and their Findings were put away, ostensibly for 102 years. Oddly, Vice-Admiral Wells, who could have shed valuable light on D'Oyly-Hughes's request to return to Scapa, was not formally interviewed.27 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Cork, the commander of the Narvik evacuation, was merely asked to comment on the Findings, and in his short reply washed his hands of any responsibility and told the Admiralty to talk to Wells.28 The will of the Board to dig further seems to have eroded after the extent of D'Oyly-Hughes's negligence became apparent.

Three obvious reasons existed, at least initially, for keeping the Findings of the Board secret. First, no institution wishes to parade its incompetence before press and Parliament. There were strong grounds for seeing D'Oyly-Hughes as criminally negligent, and the rescue effort sluggish. Over 1,500 men were dead for no good reason. It is not surprising that the Admiralty would not like this to become public knowledge any time soon. Second, informing the Germans just how stupid you could be would only help them and hurt you. Third, Churchill's government was still on shaky ground in 1940, and he most assuredly did not want people looking back at the 'Churchillian disaster'29 that was the Norwegian Campaign, a campaign he had pushed for and overseen, both as First Lord and Prime Minister. Therefore bureaucratic, military, and political factors all weighed in to keep the truth about the loss of the Glorious hidden. But a veil of secrecy extending more than fifty years became an exercise in deception.

My discovery of the long suppressed Findings of the Board of Enquiry documents the following:

1) The long-awaited Findings of the Board themselves 2) The comments of Pound, Little, and Lord Cork 3) That the air crews were at the lowest state of readiness, that the crow's nest was

unmanned, and that all the boilers were not hooked up 4) The fact that only one of forty-six survivors accurately identified the attackers 5) The signals evidence that the distress call, picked up by the Valiant, was considered

'VERY DOUBTFUL'

6) The explanation by the Board's experts that the Glorious was broadcasting on the N arvik frequency, whereas most other British ships had switched over to the Home station frequencies

7) Direct evidence that the Glorious was using her low gain transmitter to send her distress signal.

The documentation on the Glorious's distress signal is new and important, as are the comments by Pound and Lord Cork, plus the fact that Wells was never interviewed. Much confusion and speculation could have been put to rest if Roskill and other historians had been allowed to see the evidence and get the facts out. Institutions, and history, are not well served by excessive secrecy. Only by facing their mistakes can people and institutions hope to avoid repeating them, or at least mitigate their worst effects.

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308 ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS

References

1 John Winton, Carrier Glorious, Leo Cooper (London, 1986). Winton's comment on the Findings of the Board of Enquiry not yet being published at the time he wrote- see p.206.

2 Guy D'Oyly-Hughes's service record can be found in PRO (Kew), Adm. 196/53 p.148.

3 See Winton, Carrier Glorious, 130-1. 4 Quotation is from Correlli Barnett, En­

gage the Enemy More Closely, Hodder and Stoughton (London, 1991), 136.

5 The opinions of Drax, Dunbar-Nasmith, and Keyes can be found in Winton, Carrier Glo­rious, 206-7, 212.

6 The whole benighted story can be found in Winton, Carrier Glorious, 138-45.

7 Events directly related to the last mission of the Glorious and the battle in which she went down are drawn from: Winton, Carrier Glori­ous, 154-82; Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, Volume I, HMSO (London, 1954), 195-200; Adm. 234/427 pp.73-6; F. Hinsley, British Intel­ligence in the Second World War, Volume I, HMSO (London, 1981), 141-2; Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely, 134-9.

8 Although the special footnoted version of Roskill's The War at Sea, Volume I, a copy of which can be found in the library at the Public Records Office, uses the old Admiralty Case File and BR numbers, the author was able to track them down as Adm. 199/393 and Adm. 234/427. Therefore, Roskill does not refer to the Findings of the Board of Enquiry in the Official History. I obtained the Findings in July 1999.

9 Winton's strong bibliography can be found in Carrier Glorious, 232-42.

10 The Glorious had nine Sea Gladiators of 802 Squadron embarked. See testimony of Petty Officer Richard Leggott in Adm. 178/201. The presence of the RAF Hurricanes and Gladiators do not seem to have been a serious hindrance to air operations, and if worse came to worst could have been quickly dumped over the side. Britain needed its pilots, not the aircraft.

11 This is one of the most controversial aspects of the mystery surrounding the loss of the Glorious. The heavy cruiser Devonshire, fly­ing the flag of Vice-Admiral J.H.D. Cunning­ham, picked up what was described as a garbled message from the Glorious which was incom­plete and only partially decipherable. Cunning­ham, who had the King of Norway aboard and the gold reserves of his country, both being car-

ried into exile, decided not to break radio silence and report the incomplete message. Belatedly, Cunningham figured out the significance of the message, but only after the battleship Valiant had run into the hospital ship Atlantis on the morning of 9 June. The Atlantis had been stopped two days before by the German battle­cruisers and given safe passage on condition she did not wire a sighting report. The captain of the Atlantis informed the Valiant that the Germans were out, which the Valiant duly broadcast and the Devonshire picked up. Only then did Cun­ningham inform Admiral Forbes, the C-in-C Home Fleet, who immediately sent ships to guard the convoy from Narvik while Wells in the Ark Royal sent out reconnaissance patrols to search for the Glorious and the Germans. This delay cost lives. However, it must be pointed out that Cunningham was outside effective support range of the Glorious, and his 8-inch gunned, 10,000-ton cruiser was no match for its two German 11-inch gunned, 32,000-ton opponents. See Winton, Carrier Glorious, 183-4.

12 Quotation from Winton, Carrier Glori­ous, 174.

13 Adm. 178 is a special file which is an addendum to Adm. 1 and Adm. 205 and seems to contain records of courts martial and other sensitive documents which have been left out of the better travelled files. 'The Findings of the Board of Enquiry into the loss of HMS Glorious' in Adm. 178/201 is not paginated, so the author of this article will do his best to identify where in the document certain quotes and information were obtained.

14 The summary of the survivor interviews can be found in Commander J.E. Broome's 'Sec­ret' memo of 16 June in Adm. 178/201.

15 Evidence of Lieutenant-Commander R.C. Hill in letter of investigating officers of 22 June 1940 in Adm. 178/201.

16 See the individual interview transcripts in Adm. 178/201.

17 Quotation from testimony of Sub­Lieutenant (A) I.M. Maclachlan in Adm. 178/201.

18 See the testimony of Naval Airman V.R. McBride in Adm. 178/201.

19 Quotation from letter of investigating officers of 22 June 1940 in Adm. 178/201.

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ENQUIRY INTO THE LOSS OF HMS GLORIOUS 309

20 For the activities of the D'Oyly-Hughes family in his defence see Winton, Carrier Glori­ous, 219-21.

21 See letter from Captain Cyril Benson to C-in-C Rosyth of22June 1940 and testimony of Naval Airman V.R. McBride.

22 Quotation from letter of Director of Sig­nal Division of 21 November 1940.

23 The Findings of the Board are contained in Adm. 178/201.

24 Dudley Pound's minutes appear in Adm. 178/201.

25 Letter, Ramsay to Forbes, of24 June 1940 in Adm. 178/201.

26 See Hinsley, British Intelligence, 141-2.

27 Or if he was, the transcript has been removed from the file.

28 See letter, Cork to Admiralty, of 4 July 1940 in Adm. 178/201.1t reads 'I do not propose to comment on this report. Ship was working directly under V.A.A. [Wells] and received her orders from him'. One could not accuse Lord Cork of being the Harry Truman of the Royal Navy.

29 The term is that of Correlli Barnett in Engage the Enemy More Closely.

James Levy is currently completing his Ph.D. dissertation under Michael Simpson at the Uni­versity of Wales, Swansea, and teaches at New College, Hofstra University.

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