In 1940 HMS Glorious was sailing to Scapa at a fairly leisurely pace when she was intercepted by two German battlecruisers. She was sank along with 2 of her escorting destroyers with the resulting loss of 1100+ lives,most of which would die of exposure.The report on her loss was kept secret under the official secrets act, some files are not for release until 2040.


Why such secrecy?

Was it because HMS Devonshire was carrying the Norwegian royal family that she made no attempt to even try to help?

Was it because she was tasked with mining Swedish harbours ?

Was it due to the sheer incompetence of her commanding officer and the breakdown between him and his flight commanders?

Its one of the murkiest stories of WW2 as well as one of the saddest and probably the most avoidable.


This is a documentary undertaken 20 years ago.

Fascinating and disturbing




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yAahSUiXt4

VF, thank you for the  youtube. I started to watch it, but there is something with the sound. If you increase the sound to understand, it becomes suddenly a hell of a noice, that you can understand. But the level of sound to understand is nearly insupportable. I tried with other vesions on the net, but you come always to this version:



Lucky that you have subtitles, so you can decrease the sound but then you miss the other background sounds...
But as you say it is the "secrets" that are important and that you can follow...

Kind regards, Paul.

Apologies Paul, I checked it my phone and it seemed ok. I suspect half the problem is that it was recorded on VHS.

VF wrote:

Apologies Paul, I checked it my phone and it seemed ok. I suspect half the problem is that it was recorded on VHS.

 
VF, I saw now the documentary. For me the two most disturbing events were the discussing of the fuel shortage, the reason to leave the flock, and the reconnaisance airplanes not on the deck when they were needed, even without the knowledge of the two Germans ships , which had left the harbour...if I understood it all well...

Kind regards, Paul.

Good to see you back VF and thanks for posting the link.

A high-quality program from the 1990s when Channel 4 documentary making easily rivalled and often surpassed that of the BBC. From some reason Channel 4’s output seemed to go off the boil about 15 years ago (including documentary making) and has never really regained its former excellence. It was also interesting to see the television adverts from that decade. One of them for health insurance used the Charles Trenet song Boum! which was released about a year or 2 before the events described and so is contemporaneous with the era. One could think that it was a case of generic advertising but it’s probably just a co-incidence.  

As for the question posed, then I would tend to veer towards the bungling interpretation. As Willi Schulte the anti-aircraft spotter aboard Scharnhorst suggested, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau (battlecruisers) should themselves have been in abject fear of Glorious (aircraft carrier) and not the other way around. The following year when Winston Churchill met Franklin Roosevelt on their respective flagships at Placentia Bay off Newfoundland, the skies were swarming with both land-based and carrier-based spotter planes. And yet later that year Churchill’s flagship at Placentia Bay, HMS Prince of Wales (this time without air cover) would be sent to the bottom of the South China Sea along with HMS Repulse by Japanese aircraft. Incompetence again. 5 months after that, the potency of aircraft carriers would be unequivocally demonstrated by both the Japanese and the Americans at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 when the carriers of both fleets engaged one another without either being able to see the other from the surface.

In the program the testimony of the survivors and witnesses was very moving. Ship’s joiner Joe Brown saying how he was 28 years old and yet noting how ‘the youngsters seemed to be the first ones to go’ was particularly upsetting. With his West Devon accent, Joe Brown sounds just like my Uncle Don did. Don wasn’t my actual uncle, he was my father’s cousin, but we always called him ‘Uncle Don’ whenever we went down to Tavistock to visit family:

“and the same lohrry took me ‘oum t’ ‘orrabridge down ‘ere.”

Uncle Don was ex-RN too. Does anyone from that part of the world ever join any of the services other than the Senior?

Thanks for your further comments, Vizzer.

You wrote:
"As Willi Schulte the anti-aircraft spotter aboard Scharnhorst suggested, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau (battlecruisers) should themselves have been in abject fear of Glorious (aircraft carrier) and not the other way around. "

Vizzer, am I right then that in my opinion the biggest mistake was to put the airplanes under deck?
Had these aircrafts firepower against the two German vessels?
Or didn't I understood it well.

Could the Glorious have had help if the German vessels were spotted earlier?

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Thanks for your further comments, Vizzer.

You wrote:
"As Willi Schulte the anti-aircraft spotter aboard Scharnhorst suggested, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau (battlecruisers) should themselves have been in abject fear of Glorious (aircraft carrier) and not the other way around. "

Vizzer, am I right then that in my opinion the biggest mistake was to put the airplanes under deck?
Had these aircrafts firepower against the two German vessels?
Or didn't I understood it well.

Could the Glorious have had help if the German vessels were spotted earlier?

Kind regards, Paul.

Glorious didn’t even have a lookout in the crowd nest. She had boilers shut down and no aircraft patrolling above. She was caught completely flat footed. The damning testimony comes from Harry Hinsley. He told the Admiralty that the 2 german ships were at sea and they refused to pass on the information.


 
 Had they done would D’Oyly Hughes have been so slapdash? 

Unlike the official RN historian I believe the wireless officer on HMS Devonshire.That’s not the sort of thing you could make up and neither is it surprise that the logs went missing.

So it’s a disaster due to the fact that

1)You have a carrier with an insufficient escort returning to port to hurry a court martial 

2) A carrier that made no use of its aircraft to patrol and provide early warning of any threat

3) No torpedo planes even on standby

4) The Admiralty refuses to act on intelligence or pass it on in regards to the German battlecruiser

5) A statement that HMS Devonshire only received a garbled message despite the wireless officers saying otherwise and forgetting the fact that the ship went to action stations at exactly the same time as the signal was received 

6) The RN never rescued their own men. The 40 survivors were picked up by fishing vessels. Yet it’s reckoned that at least 900 from Glorious escaped the sinking + the survivors from Ardent and Acasta.


It’s more than just bungling IMHO.

This is from Hansard on the subject...


https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1999/jan/28/hms-glorious

Thank you again VF for this additional information and I read the Hansard report nearly completely.

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

am I right then that in my opinion the biggest mistake was to put the airplanes under deck?
Had these aircrafts firepower against the two German vessels?
Or didn't I understood it well.

Could the Glorious have had help if the German vessels were spotted earlier?

In a nutshell - yes - as outlined in VF’s post. Only to add that there was still a view by some in the Royal navy that aircraft carriers were merely glorified observation platforms. Their aeroplanes were merely there to locate the enemy so that the big guns such as the battlecruiser Hood and the battleship Duke of York etc could then go in and do the fighting. The idea that the aircraft carriers themselves were supreme weapons of war was not fully grasped by some. The deployment (or rather lack of deployment) of the aircraft aboard Glorious on its return journey would suggest that Captain D’Oyly-Hughes was of that mindset. As an officer with a background in submarines he was no doubt more used to the roles of ‘observe-and-report’ or ‘hit-and-run’ rather than ‘stand-and-fight’ or ‘seek-and-destroy’ as befitting a capital ship which Glorious was. Indeed, as an aircraft carrier Glorious was more than capable of going beyond even those roles to the supreme role of ‘intimidate-and-interdict’.  

Thankfully for the British navy others did indeed see the potential of aircraft carriers, namely Andrew Cunningham in the Mediterranean, whose flagship was the big gun battleship Warspite but who well knew that his real power lay with the carriers Eagle and Illustrious. The latter would play a central role 5 months later during the Battle of Taranto.

P.S. I learned a knew German word from the Secret History film – flugzeugträger. The Germans famously didn’t go in for aircraft carriers and so their word for ‘aircraft carrier’ was unknown to me until now.

This is a new (2019) theory. That Glorious was on its way back to Scapa, not for a court martial, but to have its Swordfish aircraft modified for long range flight with the intention of mining the Swedish port of Lulea. An operation given the code name Operation Paul;

HMS Glorious

link also includes Kriegsmarine combat footage

Trike, I read now your link. Thank you for the information. I wonder what VF and Vizzer think about it?
Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Trike, I read now your link. Thank you for the information. I wonder what VF and Vizzer think about it?
Kind regards, Paul.

 If its Operation Paul....


It would explain a few things but....

i) He mentions David Irving . Given the previous is this wise?

ii) HMS Glorious was reckoned to have enough fuel to easily get home. Now on the premise that she was say down to less than a 3rd of her fuel would she have had enough to sail close enough to Norway (they were thinking 30 miles - or at least D'Orly Hughes wanted to trial it) and then sail back to Scapa? Given the evidence in the 1991 documentary it would have been very tight.

My personal hunch is that

i) such was the breakdown in the command team that Hughes was on a mission to rid himself of of his air commanders

ii) The classic British upper class system/old boys network came to the fore

iii) Wells made a stupid decision to allow Glorious to sail for Scapa for such a flimsy reason

iv) HMS Devonshire was carrying the Norwegian Royal family and there mission was get them to Britain no matter what

v) This was done at the expense of the survivors of Glorious,Ardent and Acasta

vi) The RN lost one of its more valuable units through absolute incompetence and infighting 

vii) Norway was Churchills baby and had failed miserably like Gallipoli. Like Gallipoli it had promise but was half arsed in implementation.
     Given the circumstances of the time (invasion of France,Low Countries) any criticism was swept under the carpet in the interests of the nation.
    
viii) Given all of the above you end up with the 100 years rule being slapped on the case.



My two penneth.

This was the first I'd heard of Operation Paul. It certainly sounds like something Churchill would have dreamed up, given the previous suggestion of Operation Catherine, sending battleships into the Baltic.

As an aside, Glorious had originally been built as a shallow draft battlecruiser during WW1 with the intention of participating in Jacky Fishers' Baltic Scheme

Triceratops wrote:

This was the first I'd heard of Operation Paul. It certainly sounds like something Churchill would have dreamed up, given the previous suggestion of Operation Catherine, sending battleships into the Baltic.

As an aside, Glorious had originally been built as a shallow draft battlecruiser during WW1 with the intention of participating in Jacky Fishers' Baltic Scheme

For me too the first time Trike about Operation Paul.

I think as VF suggested, certainly if Churchill is involved, the end of the 100 years rule will to be awaited and one can perhaps start to see a national figurehead (boegbeeld) as Churchill in his real historical context.

As an aside  ...
A de Gaulle springs to mind as an equivalent to Churcill, at least for me, as I see it on the French historical fora.
A bit the same daring personalities, but what is for one, as the French, a deed of national pride, is for others, as the American authorities, a stupidity...as for instance the Battle of Dakar 1940
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dakar
or the invasion of St Pierre and Miquelon 1941
https://www.amazon.com/Free-French-Invasion-Miquelon-Affaire/dp/096842290X

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Triceratops wrote:

This was the first I'd heard of Operation Paul. It certainly sounds like something Churchill would have dreamed up, given the previous suggestion of Operation Catherine, sending battleships into the Baltic.

As an aside, Glorious had originally been built as a shallow draft battlecruiser during WW1 with the intention of participating in Jacky Fishers' Baltic Scheme

For me too the first time Trike about Operation Paul.

I think as VF suggested, certainly if Churchill is involved, the end of the 100 years rule will to be awaited and one can perhaps start to see a national figurehead (boegbeeld) as Churchill in his real historical context.

As an aside  ...
A de Gaulle springs to mind as an equivalent to Churcill, at least for me, as I see it on the French historical fora.
A bit the same daring personalities, but what is for one, as the French, a deed of national pride, is for others, as the American authorities, a stupidity...as for instance the Battle of Dakar 1940
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dakar
or the invasion of St Pierre and Miquelon 1941
https://www.amazon.com/Free-French-Invasion-Miquelon-Affaire/dp/096842290X

Kind regards, Paul.

On further reading it would appear that most of not all of the 100 year files have been released.


However it would appear that various documents have been ‘lost’ and that Admiral Welles report remains under lock and key.


RE De Gaulle...

He was by all accounts a real pain in the arse for both Roosevelt and Churchill during WW2!

VF wrote:

On further reading it would appear that most of not all of the 100 year files have been released.
However it would appear that various documents have been ‘lost’ and that Admiral Welles report remains under lock and key.

RE De Gaulle...
He was by all accounts a real pain in the arse for both Roosevelt and Churchill during WW2!

VF, thank you for your comments

"However it would appear that various documents have been ‘lost’ and that Admiral Welles report remains under lock and key."

I discussed here together with Dirk Marinus, the intelligence leaks in the entourage of Prince Bernhard in 1944, which had an influence on Operation Market Garden, especially the double agent King Kong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Lindemans
"The NARA retains some files on Lindemans and the documents are located among the Office of the Secretary of Defense (RG 330) records. The Lindemans files are still security classified as late as 2015."

"RE De Gaulle...
He was by all accounts a real pain in the arse for both Roosevelt and Churchill during WW2!"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/allies_at_war_01.shtml

Kind regards, Paul.

Triceratops wrote:

This was the first I'd heard of Operation Paul. It certainly sounds like something Churchill would have dreamed up, given the previous suggestion of Operation Catherine, sending battleships into the Baltic.

As an aside, Glorious had originally been built as a shallow draft battlecruiser during WW1 with the intention of participating in Jacky Fishers' Baltic Scheme

And it's an important aside Trike. The age of Glorious and the fact that she was a converted battlecruiser are sometimes cited as reasons for her loss by those who would seek to excuse the bungling.

Operation Paul does seem to have been a hare-brained plan or at least a desperate one. Thanks for posting the link. The mining of the port of Lulea (even if it had worked, which is doubtful) would surely have only disrupted iron ore supplies to Germany for a short while. There were other options available for transporting the ore while the blocked channel and mines were cleared. Then there would have been the diplomatic fall-out as a result of London having violated Swedish territory which would have been a propaganda gift to both Berlin and Moscow.

Another reason for Operation Paul being unknown is that it took place at a very dark time for Britain. 9 days after the sinking of Glorious came the loss of HMT Lancastria. That story too was generally suppressed during and after the war. Added also is the fact that, unlike the mining of Lulea (which didn’t take place) Britain had indeed already violated Norway’s neutrality with the Altmark incident earlier that year in February and also with the mining of Norwegian territorial waters (without permission from Oslo) on 8 April - i.e. before Germany invaded. But whether the story of the sinking of Glorious was subsequently played down because it was linked to Operation Paul or whether the middle of June 1940 is simply a time which Churchillian history would rather forget, doesn’t alter the fact that Glorious was badly misused as an aircraft carrier.

Indeed the argument that Glorious was ‘old’ only makes the case for not having used her aircraft properly all the starker. Admittedly one of Scharnhorst’s shells penetrated Glorious' half-inch-thick flight deck and this might not have been the case had it, say, been one of the newer, purpose-built aircraft-carriers such as Illustrious or Ark Royal whose armoured flight decks were 6 times and 7 times thicker than Glorious’ respectively. Nevertheless, neither Scharnhorst nor Gneisenau should really have been able to get anywhere near so close to Glorious as they did and being both undetected and undeterred.

Vizzer wrote:

Triceratops wrote:

This was the first I'd heard of Operation Paul. It certainly sounds like something Churchill would have dreamed up, given the previous suggestion of Operation Catherine, sending battleships into the Baltic.

As an aside, Glorious had originally been built as a shallow draft battlecruiser during WW1 with the intention of participating in Jacky Fishers' Baltic Scheme

And it's an important aside Trike. The age of Glorious and the fact that she was a converted battlecruiser are sometimes cited as reasons for her loss by those who would seek to excuse the bungling.

Operation Paul does seem to have been a hare-brained plan or at least a desperate one. Thanks for posting the link. The mining of the port of Lulea (even if it had worked, which is doubtful) would surely have only disrupted iron ore supplies to Germany for a short while. There were other options available for transporting the ore while the blocked channel and mines were cleared. Then there would have been the diplomatic fall-out as a result of London having violated Swedish territory which would have been a propaganda gift to both Berlin and Moscow.

Another reason for Operation Paul being unknown is that it took place at a very dark time for Britain. 9 days after the sinking of Glorious came the loss of HMT Lancastria. That story too was generally suppressed during and after the war. Added also is the fact that, unlike the mining of Lulea (which didn’t take place) Britain had indeed already violated Norway’s neutrality with the Altmark incident earlier that year in February and also with the mining of Norwegian territorial waters (without permission from Oslo) on 8 April - i.e. before Germany invaded. But whether the story of the sinking of Glorious was subsequently played down because it was linked to Operation Paul or whether the middle of June 1940 is simply a time which Churchillian history would rather forget, doesn’t alter the fact that Glorious was badly misused as an aircraft carrier.

Indeed the argument that Glorious was ‘old’ only makes the case for not having used her aircraft properly all the starker. Admittedly one of Scharnhorst’s shells penetrated Glorious' half-inch-thick flight deck and this might not have been the case had it, say, been one of the newer, purpose-built aircraft-carriers such as Illustrious or Ark Royal whose armoured flight decks were 6 times and 7 times thicker than Glorious’ respectively. Nevertheless, neither Scharnhorst nor Gneisenau should really have been able to get anywhere near so close to Glorious as they did and being both undetected and undeterred.

Absolutely agree Vizzer.

The RN (and I wonder how much Churchill had to do with this - the archetypal back seat driver) made a complete cock up of using their carriers in 1939. HMS Courageous sunk very early on hunting U-Boats (sound enough theory with an escort carrier, not with one of your limited number of fleet carriers),HMS Glorious in the Arctic and very nearly Ark Royal of Norway. 

Two ships thrown away. Imagine Force z with those 2 carriers. They would have perhaps stood a fighting chance if they had a CAP of sea hurricanes in Dec 1941.