HMS Glorious: The Royal Navy's Forgotten Disaster

The Quiz Question

On 8 June 1940, the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was caught and sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Norway, along with two escorting destroyers. Roughly how many British sailors died?

A. About 200
B. About 500
C. About 900
D. Over 1,500

The answer is D. Over 1,500. Here is the full story.

On 8 June 1940, while the eyes of the world were fixed on the beaches of Dunkirk, one of the Royal Navy's worst disasters of the entire war was unfolding in the cold waters of the Norwegian Sea. The aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, along with her two escorting destroyers HMS Ardent and HMS Acasta, was caught and destroyed by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Of roughly 1,561 men aboard the three ships, only 45 survived. For decades, their story was barely told.

A Catastrophe the World Barely Noticed

The timing of the disaster meant it was almost completely buried by other news. Dunkirk dominated the front pages, Winston Churchill was rallying the nation, and France was days from collapse. The sinking of Glorious received almost no press coverage, and the families of the dead were given pitifully little information about what had happened or why.

Only 45 men survived from a combined complement of approximately 1,561 — a survival rate of less than three percent. The loss of life was catastrophic by any measure, yet the disaster slipped into the shadows of history in a way that still troubles naval historians today. For the families left behind, that silence lasted for decades.

Questions about why Glorious was lost — and whether lives could have been saved — have never fully gone away. The Royal Navy's handling of the aftermath, including the suppression of a Board of Inquiry's findings, ensured that this tragedy remained controversial long after the war ended.

HMS Glorious: A Carrier With a Complicated Past

HMS Glorious had a long and distinguished history before her final voyage. Originally laid down as a battlecruiser in 1916, she saw action at the Battle of Jutland before being converted into a fleet carrier under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. By 1940, she was a 22,500-ton vessel capable of operating around 48 aircraft — a significant asset to a Royal Navy already stretched thin.

Her commanding officer in June 1940 was Captain Guy D'Oyly-Hughes, a highly decorated submariner from the First World War whose temperament made him poorly suited to carrier command. His relationship with his aviation staff was poisonous. During the Norway campaign, he had relieved his Commander (Flying), Commander J.B. Heath, of duty — a decision that left the ship's air operations in a deeply unstable state at the worst possible moment.

The internal dysfunction had real operational consequences. On 8 June 1940, Glorious was sailing without a full complement of aircraft on her flight deck and — crucially — without any aircraft airborne on search or anti-submarine patrol. For a fleet carrier operating in contested waters, this was an extraordinary and fatal lapse.

The Norway Campaign: Why Glorious Was There

Britain and France had intervened in Norway following Germany's Operation Weserübung — the stunning combined land, sea and airborne assault launched on 9 April 1940 that seized Norway and Denmark almost simultaneously. The Allies scrambled to respond, and a campaign of fierce but ultimately futile fighting followed in the fjords and mountains of central and northern Norway.

The Allies briefly recaptured Narvik on 28 May 1940, but the collapse of France made the victory meaningless. Evacuation orders were issued almost immediately, and British forces began withdrawing from Norway under enormous pressure.

HMS Glorious played a remarkable role in the final days of the campaign. RAF pilots of 46 Squadron and 263 Squadron — flying Hurricanes and Gladiators — landed their aircraft on her flight deck rather than abandon them in Norway. This was the first time single-seat, non-navalised fighters had ever successfully landed on a carrier, a feat of airmanship that deserves to be far better remembered. Tragically, most of those pilots would die within days alongside the carrier that had saved their aircraft.

On 8 June 1940, Glorious departed the Norwegian coast with orders to make for Scapa Flow, escorted only by the destroyers HMS Ardent (H41) and HMS Acasta (H09).

The Hunters: Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

The German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were on an aggressive sortie — Operation Juno — designed to disrupt the Allied evacuation and attack shipping in Norwegian waters. Both were fast, powerful vessels of around 32,000 tons displacement, armed with nine 11-inch guns and capable of speeds exceeding 31 knots. Against an aircraft carrier and two destroyers, they were overwhelming force.

The German squadron was commanded by Admiral Wilhelm Marschall and also included the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and several destroyers. It was a powerful raiding group looking for exactly the kind of target that Glorious represented.

At approximately 16:00 on 8 June, lookouts aboard Scharnhorst spotted smoke on the horizon at a range of around 28 miles. At that distance, the German ships were far beyond effective response from Glorious — and because no British aircraft were airborne, there was no warning. The hunters had found their prey before the prey knew it was being hunted.

The Battle: 45 Minutes to Catastrophe

The engagement opened at approximately 16:32 when Scharnhorst and Gneisenau began firing at a range of around 24,000 yards — well over thirteen miles. At that extreme range, Glorious had almost no means of fighting back. Her own guns could not reach the German ships, and her flight deck was cluttered with the RAF Hurricanes she had taken aboard, making a rapid aircraft launch extraordinarily difficult even if time had permitted it.

Early salvoes struck Glorious's flight deck and started fires that sealed the fate of any remaining chance to get aircraft airborne. Within minutes, the carrier was burning and taking heavy damage. She was a 22,500-ton ship being destroyed by battleships she could neither outrun nor outfight.

HMS Ardent raced forward into the storm of shellfire, laying a smokescreen and launching torpedoes in a desperate attempt to buy time for the carrier. She fought until she had nothing left, ultimately being overwhelmed and sunk — a small destroyer against two battleships, fighting to the last. Her sacrifice won precious minutes but could not change the outcome.

Glorious finally sank at approximately 18:10. The entire engagement, from first salvo to the carrier going under, had lasted less than two hours.

Heroes of the Acasta: A Last Act of Defiance

The story of HMS Acasta stands apart from the general catastrophe as an act of almost incomprehensible courage. Commander Charles Glasfurd knew his ship was doomed. The carrier was gone, Ardent was gone, and two German battleships were bearing down on him. He turned Acasta back into the guns anyway.

Under a storm of shellfire, Acasta fired her torpedoes at Scharnhorst. One struck home below the battleship's rear turret, killing 48 German sailors, flooding several compartments, and forcing Scharnhorst to break off the operation and limp to Trondheim for repairs. It was a hit that had genuine strategic consequences — Scharnhorst was out of action until late 1940, a significant blow to German surface fleet capability.

Able Seaman C. Carter was one of the very few survivors of Acasta. He later gave an account of Commander Glasfurd addressing the crew over the ship's tannoy before the attack: "We are going into action — good luck to you all." Glasfurd did not survive. He went down with his ship, having chosen a fighting death over any other kind.

The torpedo hit from the doomed Acasta was one of the most consequential single actions by any small warship in the entire Norwegian campaign — and it is remembered by far too few people today.

The Men in the Water: A Rescue That Never Came

When Glorious went down, her survivors were left in life rafts in the Norwegian Sea. Water temperatures in those latitudes can kill within hours through hypothermia, and the men who made it off the ship faced a desperate race against the cold. A distress signal had been sent, but whether it was received and acted upon promptly remains one of the most disputed aspects of the entire disaster.

No rescue ships arrived in time. The Norwegian merchant vessel Borgund reached the survivors on 10 June — nearly two days after the sinking. She rescued 37 men. A further six survivors were picked up by the German seaplane tender Grimstadfjord, and two more were rescued by a German floatplane. Those eight men became prisoners of war.

In total, 45 men survived from 1,561. Among the dead were virtually all of the RAF pilots of 46 Squadron and 263 Squadron who had performed the extraordinary feat of landing their Hurricanes and Gladiators on Glorious's deck just days before. They had saved their aircraft from Norway, only to perish with the ship that had taken them aboard.

Why Was Glorious Caught Unprepared? The Controversies

The question of why Glorious was sailing without air patrols active — a fundamental requirement of carrier operations in contested waters — has never been fully resolved. One persistent claim holds that Captain D'Oyly-Hughes had requested to sail ahead of the main convoy so that he could return to Scapa Flow quickly enough to court-martial Commander Heath, the flying officer he had dismissed during the campaign. This has been debated but never definitively proved or disproved.

What is not disputed is that no aircraft were on anti-submarine or surface search patrol, and that German ships were not spotted until they were already in gun range. These are failures of basic carrier procedure that are very difficult to explain away regardless of the reasons behind them.

A Board of Inquiry was convened after the disaster, but its findings were suppressed for decades — fuelling accusations that the Admiralty was protecting senior figures from scrutiny. Naval historian Andrew Jampoler, in his 2009 study Scapegoat, argued that D'Oyly-Hughes bore substantial personal responsibility for the loss of his ship. Others have pointed to broader systemic failures in Royal Navy carrier doctrine, which had not yet developed the kind of robust air search procedures that would become standard later in the war.

The Admiralty's slow response to the distress signal — assuming it was received — also came under heavy criticism. Ships were available that might have reached the survivors in time. They were not sent.

Legacy: Remembering the Men of Glorious, Ardent and Acasta

The names of 1,515 men lost with the three ships are commemorated on the naval memorials at Portsmouth, Chatham and Plymouth. They include sailors, Royal Marines, and RAF aircrew who gave their lives during the Norwegian campaign and who have never received anything approaching the recognition given to the survivors of Dunkirk — whose evacuation ended just one week before.

A dedicated memorial to HMS Glorious, Ardent and Acasta was unveiled at Eastney, Portsmouth in 2000 — sixty years after the sinking. It stands as a long-overdue acknowledgement of a disaster that the establishment was slow to confront. The campaign to have the Board of Inquiry papers released, driven largely by survivors' families and determined campaigners in the 1990s and 2000s, finally brought more of the story into the light.

The disaster did prompt changes in Royal Navy carrier operating procedures. The requirement for aircraft to be airborne on search patrol whenever a carrier was at sea in contested waters became non-negotiable doctrine — a lesson written in the deaths of more than 1,500 men.

Every year on 8 June, a small but dedicated group of descendants, veterans' supporters and naval historians mark the anniversary to ensure these men are not forgotten. They deserve a much wider audience. Their story is one of extraordinary courage — from the RAF pilots who landed on a carrier for the first time, to the sailors of Ardent who screened a doomed ship with their lives, to Commander Glasfurd of Acasta who turned back into the guns and changed the course of the naval war with a single torpedo.

If you found this story moving, please share it with someone who loves naval history — and leave a comment below telling us what struck you most about the men of HMS Glorious, Ardent and Acasta. Their sacrifice deserves to be known.