The Age of Invincible: The Ship that Defined the Modern Royal Navy

Introduction

The grey, overcast skies that day were hardly auspicious. But this really was the dawn of a new era for the Royal Navy. On 19 March 1980, HMS Invincible, the sixth ship in history to bear that name, slid gingerly into Portsmouth harbour for the first time and tied up at the South Railway Jetty.

There was certainly a sense of anticipation among the officers on Invincible’s bridge. Most of those gazing out from the bridge windows had entered Portsmouth many times before in other ships. But they were more used to the compact dimensions of destroyers or frigates. The fact that Invincible’s bridge towered a full nine decks above the waterline gave a hint that this was no ordinary arrival. Few of those staring out from that lofty perch had seen a view like this across the ancient naval base.

And, despite the discouraging weather, there were more than the usual knots of onlookers and well-wishers who have, through the ages, from the Round Tower and the other vantage points at the entrance to the historic Portsmouth dockyard, witnessed the comings and goings of Royal Navy vessels. For the inaugural appearance of a major new warship in what is to become her home port always stirs a special interest. And HMS Invincible was the biggest warship to have been designed and built in Britain since the Second World War.

Her commanding officer, Captain Michael Livesay, RN, surveyed this scene. He was certainly conscious of the moment, and of the excitement running through the ship’s company. Tall, trim, with sharp good looks, he was one of the Navy’s brightest and best, marked out since his earliest days of training at Dartmouth. He was keeping a very close eye on the navigator and pilot as they brought this valuable ship in to her berth. Strictly speaking, she was still in the hands of the shipyard that had built her. But he wanted to make sure nothing went wrong on what was Invincible’s debut before the rest of the Fleet.

Above the mechanical hum, the clicks, whirs, and crackle of instruments, gauges, and intercoms that are the ever-present accompaniment in the enclosed, almost clinical surroundings of a modern warship’s bridge, there was a special edge in people’s voices as orders were issued and acknowledged. And a special intensity as the bridge team scanned the banks of new consoles and radar screens. But Mike Livesay had enough time for a joke or two with those around him, despite the responsibility which he knew was on his shoulders. It was typical of his air of unflappability.

Among those with him on the bridge that day was his second-in-command, Dermot Rhodes, who had been a year behind his captain at Dartmouth. Both men knew that, in a few hours, the ship would be theirs. Both also knew that, already, as well as the casual spectators gathered in clusters at the harbour’s entrance, there would be countless pairs of professional eyes scanning every detail of the gleaming flanks and tall, modern, uncluttered upperworks of this new pride of the Navy to make sure that nothing was amiss. And, soon, it would be Dermot Rhodes’ responsibility to make sure that nothing was, and that all the right protocols and rituals that the Navy holds so dear would be observed every time from now on whenever Invincible left or entered port. But, for Commander Rhodes too, it was a moment of great honour and satisfaction.

Because Invincible was not just another big, brand-new ship. She was also a new concept in warship design. And, perhaps more than any British warship for generations, she was a symbol of the fortunes of the Navy itself, and maybe even of where the country saw its place in the world. And those fortunes had certainly taken a dramatic turn in recent years.

There had been many other ships before which had left their mark on the naval and international scenes. Among them, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was HMS Dreadnought, another new concept of warship produced to confront the growing German naval challenge. She created a revolution and defined an era.

There was the mighty battle-cruiser Hood. She was not a novel design herself. But, between the two world wars, she seemed to represent the very essence of British imperial might, at least as Britons themselves perceived it. A beautiful ship, her huge but flowing lines spoke of grace and strength, but not menace.

However, she also mirrored the growing gap between the image and reality of empire. HMS Hood became a legend. But, like the country’s imperial pretensions, she failed to keep pace with the pressures of the changing world around her. And she was found devastatingly wanting when she was exposed to the harsh realities of modern conflict against the new German battleship Bismarck on a bleak May morning in the icy north Atlantic waters off Greenland in 1941. Whether it was a lucky shot or not, she was literally blown to pieces, with just three survivors from her crew of more than 1,400.

It was part of the essence of Invincible’s symbolism, and a sign of the times, that she was born with an identity crisis. She was an aircraft carrier, albeit not like any that had gone before. But that fact had only recently been officially acknowledged. Indeed, a great many people seemed to have gone to great lengths to conceal it, because to have done otherwise would have been to court disaster, at least as far as the Navy was concerned, and threatened the survival of the ship and what she represented.

And she was conceived out of what had been, for the Navy, a calamity. After the Second World War, aircraft carriers had become its heart. Their squadrons of aircraft had taken over from the battleships’ guns as the foundations of the Navy’s striking power and its ability to range the oceans, and were the raison d’être for much of the rest of the Fleet.

The Navy had been devoting huge resources, and heroic efforts, to staying at the cutting edge of the business of flying fixed-wing aircraft from ships at sea. As the aircraft had got bigger and more powerful, o the challenges too had grown. And the necessary accompanying paraphernalia of steam catapults, arrester gear, landing aids, radar direction, and support facilities had got ever more complex.

In the early 1960s, the Navy had seemed to invest all its hopes in a new generation of big and expensive aircraft carriers, the first of which was to have been the now almost mythical – at least in naval circles – CVA-01. Those hopes were shattered when the plans were abruptly cancelled in early 1966, and it was announced that what had seemed an essential prop to modern naval power was to be taken away.

It looked as if fixed-wing flying at sea would be coming to an early end for the Royal Navy. It was a skill which the Navy had helped pioneer, and of which it was still a leading exponent. And with its passing, it seemed, would also pass the Navy’s ability to sail the oceans independently.

It was, of course, a huge shock for the Navy. For many outside naval circles, though, and even some within, it was more akin to a self-inflicted wound. Was not the real story that, ot for the first time%, ([A-Z])heir Lordships of the Admiralty had failed – or refused – to acknowledge the changing times and adjust their ambitions accordingly?

After all, the decades after the Second World War had appeared to be the era of trying to manage, and in the eyes of many actually mismanaging, Britain’s relative and absolute global decline. How much could, and should, Britain afford to do in the world? And by what means? What was genuinely in the country’s best interests, and what was simply trying to cling on to an illusion of national grandeur?

Perhaps inevitably, the Navy, and in particular its quest for carriers, found themselves at the eye of this particular political storm. In very different circumstances, they still are. Of all conventional weaponry in the modern age, aircraft carriers are perhaps the most telling signal of how a country views its place in the world. Indeed, the giant carriers of today’s US Navy have been – apart from nuclear weapons – probably the most influential instruments of war of this age, and possibly any. Such associations have become both a strength and a weakness, especially when their fate has come to be debated in Britain.

It is something of an irony that the Navy’s past glories and supremacy have almost become a handicap to its recent fortunes and potential future. The story of the last few decades has been one of painful adjustment for all the services, and for the country. For the Navy, though, it has often seemed a particularly anguished experience. Its past achievements and reputation meant that, like Nelson’s Column, the pedestal on which it stood seemed tallest, so its fall has appeared the furthest and hardest. And every time that it has tried to defend its position or revive its fortunes, its leaders have been accused of dwelling on the past. Had not the Navy’s main function and purpose been to help build and defend an empire? Now that the empire was going, perhaps the country’s maritime pretensions should logically subside with it. This natural impulse in the minds of many has been the hardest hurdle that the Navy has had to overcome.

Already, by the beginning of the twentieth century, when HMS Dreadnought took to the water, the Navy was having to reconcile itself to a dwindling supremacy. Maintaining its ascendancy in all the oceans was not possible – it was increasingly a matter of calculation, risk, priorities, and alliances. Industrialization – once the rest of the world had caught up with Britain’s initial lead – inevitably shifted a balance of power which had favoured the maritime nations more towards the continental ones. The advent of air power also brought a new vulnerability to the British Isles. So, in two world wars, sea power remained indispensable to the nation’s survival, but no longer a sufficient guarantor. It could not, in isolation, in a world of total war, keep the country safe.

Following the end of the Second World War, the Royal Navy was as large and powerful as it had ever been. But both it and the country were having to adjust to subordinate roles, completely eclipsed by the power of the United States. What should be the Royal Navy’s role, when Britannia quite clearly no longer ruled the waves, when the legacy of empire now appeared to be more of a burden than a benefit, when Britain’s most likely adversary was overwhelmingly a continental power, and when the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to be calling into question the very functions of naval forces and the slow-acting levers of maritime power, since full-scale war could be over almost literally in a flash?

Outward appearances were actually reassuring. The post-war contractions were obvious. But throughout most of this period Britain still had comfortably the most significant Western navy after the United States. The Fleet consisted of many fine, imposing ships, with a full range of capabilities.

And yet, for many, there was an underlying sense that it was beleaguered, struggling to find a coherent and consistent rationale for itself, even that it was living on borrowed time. And the admirals were often frustrated in their many attempts to make the maritime case.

Perhaps they did not always make that case as effectively as they could have done. And maybe, on too many occasions, the critics were right and the admirals were clinging to old thinking, and holding on to the Navy’s traditions like a crutch.

Many of those admirals probably were too steeped in the past. As late as the 1980s, some of those in charge had joined the Navy when it was still the most powerful in the world, and they had done their initial seagoing training in battleships that had fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

Of course, the world has changed, and so has the country. The Navy’s place and role in both are also clearly different. People’s perceptions of it – in as much as they think of it at all in this day and age – are not what they were, and that has become a major part of the challenge. But the Navy, beneath its veneer of traditions, has also become something different.

Most of those responsible for running it in the past few decades have been driven by a conviction that the Navy still can and should play a special role as an instrument of British policy and arm of the country’s defence. That was true in the Cold War. It was true even more after the Cold War ended. And it is true in what might now be called the post-post-Cold-War era after the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the United States, as policymakers try to get a clearer perspective of what the new strategic and security landscape actually looks like now, what the real and enduring threats are, and how they can be kept at bay.

The basis of the Navy’s case remains that, for a country like Britain, with its traditions and its modern circumstances, a relatively small but very wealthy nation reliant on globalisation and global trade, naval forces – perhaps more than any others – provide the greatest range of possibilities, options, and flexibility in deciding whether, when, and how to exercise influence and, if necessary, to project real power. And the evidence for that is there, the Navy contends with increasing exasperation, if only people will look and think hard enough. The questions are whether they really want to or can be persuaded to, and whether the country really wants to be that kind of international actor.

When HMS Invincible emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it had been after an almighty struggle in the corridors of Whitehall. It was a story of inter-service and even intra-service rivalry, of infighting and intrigue, of personalities pitted against each other, of hopes dashed and at least partially revived.

The fact that the story of fixed-wing flying at sea in the Royal Navy did not quite come to an end in the 1970s was due to the appearance of HMS Invincible and her sisters. And many different individuals, from different backgrounds, with different outlooks and often sharply opposing views, had a variety of parts to play in the unfolding drama.

So Invincible was at the heart of the revised vision of what the Navy should be and what it should do in the late 1970s and beyond, after the upheavals that had gone before, with both the nation’s and the Fleet’s seemingly reduced horizons. At the time, the Cold War appeared to be stretching endlessly into the future. Invincible also arrived on the scene at perhaps the nadir of Britain’s post-war economic fortunes.

For some in the Navy, and especially those who had served in and flown from the decks of the old carriers, Invincible and her sisters yet to come were pale shadows of the ships that they were succeeding. In place of their thundering squadrons of fighters and heavy strike aircraft, the new ships would carry to sea just a handful of small jets and some helicopters.

For most of those officers and sailors gathered aboard Invincible as she edged in the gloom towards her berth for the first time on that March morning in 1980, Invincible very much represented the promise of new hope; a link to the past for sure, but more importantly a lifeline to a new, cohesive, and effective future for the Fleet more in keeping with the nation’s real security priorities. Yes, the aircraft that she would carry would be smaller, slower, and more limited than those that had gone before. It was only the fact that they would be ‘jump jets’, relying on vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) to operate, that made them viable aboard a ship like Invincible at all. But the package would maintain at least some of the crucial skills and capabilities for operating aircraft at sea, and with it the Navy’s ability to act independently and flexibly around the world. Many of those aboard knew that they were lucky to have her.

And yet, to other sceptics, Invincible still looked like an extravagance in a period of chronic national financial strain, the incarnation of the continuing dreams of ‘big ship’ admirals to hold on to at least a semblance of the past. She was expensive, vulnerable, and of dubious value.

But none of the people involved, on whichever side of the debate they stood, and certainly none of the people who lined her decks or waved her in as she arrived in Portsmouth, can have foreseen how tumultuous her early career would be. Barely a year after she was commissioned, another series of political decisions looked set to bring her Royal Navy service to a premature end. Within months of those developments, much larger crowds than had greeted her on that gloomy morning in March 1980 would be waving her and her crew off to war.

She and her sisters would be modernized and adapted as the world moved on from the Cold War. In an ironic twist, they would become the bridge to a longed-for new generation of big carriers. These would become the focus of a debate with so many echoes of the CVA-01 rows that it must have made those who were involved in the arguments of the 1960s almost wince with painful memories. Where, in the end, it will all leave the Royal Navy remains very much open to question.

But, on Invincible’s first day with the Fleet, all that lay in the future. Even the ceremonial commissioning of the ship by Her Majesty the Queen was still to come. Once Invincible was firmly tied up at her berth in Portsmouth, with very little delay and the minimum of fuss, Captain Livesay signed for the ship in a low-key ceremony in the hangar. The Red Ensign, which signified that, up to that moment, she was still the property and responsibility of her builders, was lowered, the White Ensign was raised, and she officially entered Royal Navy service.

CHAPTER ONE

Reviewing the Fleet

It is a tradition that dates back at least to the fifteenth century: the royal review of the Fleet. In 1415, Henry V inspected his ships before sailing for France for the campaign that culminated in the Battle of Agincourt.

Now it was Monday, 10 June 1953, at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The Royal Navy mustered nearly 200 warships for the Coronation Review. The year before, Queen Elizabeth II had ascended to the throne. Indeed, there was talk of a new Elizabethan age. Given that the reign of the previous Elizabeth conjured up images of Drake and Raleigh, of defeating the Spanish Armada, and of the country establishing itself as a power on the high seas, it seemed to bode well for the Navy. Also, the Labour government that had taken office at the end of the Second World War had been replaced by a Conservative administration under Winston Churchill which would surely not turn its back on the Navy or a world role for Britain.

Riding at anchor were plenty of fine-looking cruisers and destroyers, but now just one battleship, HMS Vanguard. The long line of aircraft carriers was confirmation that they were now seen as the Fleet’s capital ship, even though some of these were just training ships with no aircraft of their own.

Aboard one of those carriers, HMS Implacable, just a few weeks after entering Dartmouth Naval College, was a young Dermot Rhodes. For him, it was a dramatic and inspiring introduction to the Navy.

He came from Sheffield and went to Rotherham grammar school. But he did not relish the prospect of an office job in South Yorkshire. When he announced that he wanted to join the Navy, his father arranged through a friend for him to spend two weeks at sea on a Hull fishing trawler headed for the Arctic. Fortunately for him, the weather was kind, and he enjoyed it. On his return, he applied to the Navy and was accepted.

After two years at Dartmouth, and initial sea training, Rhodes would be sent as a midshipman to the still-considerable Mediterranean Fleet. He would be based mainly in Malta, still a substantial headquarters and very much a major naval base. There would be anti-arms-smuggling patrols off Cyprus, with shore leave in Beirut and a memorable taxi ride to Damascus – these were more innocent days in many ways. Then, after more courses at home in England, it would be back to the Mediterranean and Malta aboard HMS Girdle Ness, the trials ship for the new medium-range surface-to-air weapon, Sea Slug, the Navy’s first real home-grown introduction to the missile age, and a great hope for the Fleet’s future effectiveness. So, it was a not-untypical progress for a young naval officer through Britain’s imperial and colonial twilight of the 1950s. But, beneath the surface, these had been troubling times for the Admiralty.

For Britain, the legacy of the Second World War was a swirl of contradictions. There was the mantle and euphoria of victory. The country still saw itself as a great power, with trappings of empire and obligations to discharge. But it also stood increasingly in the shadow of the United States and the growing power of the Soviet Union. And it was exhausted. The atmosphere for a long time in the period after 1945 was grim and austere, and years of persistent and chronic economic underperformance lay ahead.

Many in the Admiralty believed that there would be a return to something close to the pre-war state of affairs. The Navy would resume its role of protecting the sea routes and the country’s world-wide possessions and interests. Many of the great ships did quickly disappear to the scrap yard, as the Navy suffered the same massive post-war contractions that the other services had to face. The huge building programmes under way at the end of the war were massively curtailed.

In 1948, Julian Oswald was a 15-year-old about to embark on a Navy career that would take him to the very top – although he obviously did not know that then, and had applied to join Dartmouth as a way of escaping Latin at school. So he was rather alarmed to pick up a newspaper and see a front-page picture of a cruiser and four destroyers and, under it, a caption stating that this was the entire operational strength of the Home Fleet.

Of course, the Navy had other fleets. Serving out in the Far East at the time, aboard the destroyer HMS Cossack, was a young James Eberle. This was the real Royal Navy, he felt, rather than the Home Fleet. Out here, the conflict had not really ended, and there was a proper job to do, far from home, continuing to defend the empire. This was the period of the Yangtze Incident, with the frigate HMS Amethyst trapped by communist Chinese forces, and then managing a daring escape. There were patrols to be carried out in the Malacca Straits. The Korean War was not very far into the future. As for the Mediterranean Fleet, that was all about nice foreign postings with the family, and polo in Malta.

The state of the Home Fleet may have been an extreme, but the realisation did begin to dawn in the Admiralty that its plans for the future were too ambitious, that it would have far less money and far fewer ships than it had expected. While much of the Navy may never emerge again from the half-life of post-war reserve, there were still plenty of ships with reassuringly familiar names and outlines; cruisers that had done great service in the war, and even some of the most modern battleships survived for a few years, albeit in the reduced circumstances of training roles. This would continue to be a time of painful adjustment. This was a navy in which sailors still slept in hammocks. In the ranks of officers, there were many whose attitude and outlook would not have been out of place in Victorian times. But it had turned out to be another world compared to what had gone before, and it would keep on changing.

There was the afterglow of military victory, a respect still for the military and affection for the Navy, and an expectation that the country would resume a role if not as a superpower, then at least as one of the world’s leading powers. Its industrial base was dilapidated, but still in better shape than most of its leading rivals, and it was producing world-beating designs. The fact that they were the products of what would soon come to look like cottage industries in world comparisons had not yet dawned on most people in Britain.

The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – NATO – was prompted and encouraged from London. Since a defining element of it was keeping the transatlantic link between North America and Europe, the Navy could hardly complain – it seemed as if it was, fundamentally, a maritime alliance. But, as time passed and the shape of the East-West strategic balance shifted, the dominating factor in Britain’s membership – and the dominating perspective along the corridors of Whitehall – would come to be the continuing commitment of substantial British land and air forces on the continental mainland.

Throughout this period, the Royal Navy remained an indisputably large and powerful fleet – albeit with many material and manning shortfalls – set apart from every other western navy bar that of the United States. But the drag of a stumbling economy was taking its toll. The Naval Staff saw most of its ambitious post-war plans for new classes of aircraft carriers and powerful new cruisers repeatedly deferred or shelved. For the most part, it had to be content with modifying what major ships it had as best it could, and busying itself with the bread-and-butter business of modernizing its smaller escorts for whatever role would be required of them.

The most troubling problem from the early post-war years and into the 1950s was the developing debate, which simmered and occasionally raged, over what precisely the role of traditional naval forces would be in the context of all-out nuclear war and its aftermath. Indeed, did they actually have a major role in the age of the thermonuclear weapon? Or should the Navy’s focus be on more limited conflicts? After all, these were contingencies that seemed more likely actually to occur, given the instabilities in the Middle East and Far East, and the contraction pains of British imperial decline.

The siege mentality in the Admiralty by the mid-1950s was unmistakeable. The Army, somehow, had a more defined role. And the image of the RAF seemed far more in tune with the mood of the times, of galloping and exciting technological change in areas like radar, rockets, and jet aircraft. As it took delivery of its amazing new V-bombers, and took custodianship of the British nuclear deterrent, it seemed to be the dominant service, a bitter pill for those in what was supposedly the Senior Service. In contrast, the Navy, with perhaps still too many big old ships and an unclear strategic outlook, appeared in some ways like an anachronism.

What is more, there was, in 1956, the trauma of the Suez Crisis. That unhappy confrontation seemed to deal a devastating blow to the country’s self-image as a great power, and brought home many of the realities of its actual position in the global pecking order.

But, a year earlier, in 1955, Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma had taken over as perhaps the most remarkable First Sea Lord of modern times. It was, perhaps, something of a reflection of what kind of country Britain still was then that the uncle by marriage of The Queen should be taking up the