HMS Illustrious and Operation Excess - Fliegerkorps X marks the spot

[Music] [Music] hello everybody it's time for another collaborative take on some naval history so today i have with me armored carriers of the website of the same name it's a very excellent website i suggest you go and have a look at it which as the name suggests evaluates the performance and uh damage proof dash damage recovery of the various armored carriers of the royal navy amongst others and uh eventually i believe he's looking at expanding into some of the other uh armored aircraft carriers of other navy such as taiho but uh yeah that aside he's obviously done a lot of work and a lot of research into the this particular branch of naval history and so thought we'd we'd have him along to talk about one particular incident which was the bombing of hms illustrious during operation excess which was the wonderfully titled if somewhat more mundane convoy operation in 1941 in the mediterranean one of many so uh thank you very much for joining us and uh thank you did you do you want to maybe uh introduce yourself a little bit more yeah um no look i'm uh i guess uh i'm very briefly this has sort of been a bit of a hobby slash obsession of mines uh for oh [ __ ] almost 20 years now time flies when you're having fun um i sort of i'm an australian so i grew up hearing all about um how australia was saved at the battle of coral sea and the major successes and of the us navy's carriers and they were a major um part of my youth growing up i was always reading about the um the different us carriers and their designs and their operations and their in their missions and just occasionally you'd sort of come across one or two sentences here or there relating to the royal navy carriers but never much more than that um [Music] but come late 1990s there was a whole string of really interesting books about franklin and bunker hill and again there were a few um castaway sentences in those books relating to an incident which they compare were comparing themselves to which was the bombing of hms illustrious and i got somewhat frustrated uh at the lack of information about that incident so i decided to find it for myself and from there i've got this multiple dozens of pages website um looking at all the various comings and goings and actions and reactions of the royal navy's fleet carriers okay very nice and obviously we're gonna we'll look at one particular aspect today so as with uh most of the other videos that we've done in this format i will be asking questions and uh pitching in with the occasional bits of commentary maybe some subsidiary questions as well but since you're obviously the one who's done by far the more in-depth research on this particular bit um it will be mostly the information coming from yourself so make sure you keep keep me on track by uh asking those questions otherwise i might end up end up rambling off down a uh side street so well that's always always good we always encourage uh side rambles of naval history here so um we'll start off with the the first question so setting the scene somewhat before operation excess obviously we know illustrious had well had been the carrier that was present for the relatively successful attack on toronto but what had illustrious been getting up to between tyranto and her assignment to operation access well this was pretty much um the high point of royal navy pre-war carrier doctrine um they saw the use of its carriers in the mediterranean as opposed to the pacific where it had a completely different doctrine but in the mediterranean and in the north atlantic the carriers were essentially floating cap bases i suppose although at the time they called them umbrellas and cap was a bit more of a later development when you had very extensive fighter control rooms and radar tracking radar plots but at this point they still had the rudimentary uh fighter tracking and fighter direction but it was still just basically aircraft above the fleet being vectored towards contacts um illustrious immediately upon its arrival in the mediterranean proved the value of this doctrine sitting in among the battleships and cruisers anytime a reconnaissance aircraft was spotted on radar her four mars were redirected to either shoot it down or scare it off and so for the first time since the outbreak of war in the mediterranean the royal navy had essentially a bubble of air control around his feet wherever it went so therefore it was much more happy uh to shall we say put itself in the way of danger a little bit more so than it had previously so yeah so she's basically protecting the fleet uh maybe conducting the odd strike against whatever targets become available um but obviously her main role at this point is fleet defense so defense and support yeah so uh her asw aircraft would be floating scouting the perimeter but also occasionally taking the odd torpedo run against italian torpedo italian convoys if they were anywhere nearby also dropping flares for um any sort of bombardment mission at night and the likes but primarily yes just a essentially a um voting air superiority ship so in that vein what was her role being assigned to operation access the the convoy run that she was she was uh put on to at this point so yeah pretty much exactly that excess wasn't actually a mundane convoy it was actually one of the biggest convoys of the war altogether it was the realization through british intelligence that the germans were coming that they were not just sending bombers and fighters to sicily they're also planning on sending rommel into north africa so they realized that malta would likely soon be in trouble and they realized that uh fairly soon the center of the mediterranean would be blocked off so they tried one last big rush of convoys from gibraltar to malta and to alexandria and from alexandria to malta and to gibraltar so both directions so coming up from alexandria was the uh fleet i think it was force a with uh illustrious and the two modernized queen elizabeth battleships queen elizabeth and sorry it was a valiant and um war spite um and from the other direction it was arc royal um covered with renown and various other vessels so they were both covering convoys towards malta and the carriers were doing their job of interdicting um reconnaissance to prevent and disrupt any follow-up attacks and if follow-up attacks were detected then if while their full mars weren't likely to be able to chop them all out of the sky they could most certainly disrupt any high altitude bombing runs or any uh low altitude torpedo runs right and also as that leads us on to then the next question which is that obviously the italians and the germans had a rather distinct desire to make sure these convoys did not arrive that malta at least intact so what was the first opposition that illustrious encountered and how did her air group and her umbrella of full mars cope with that so it was actually a little bit more than just excess because at this point missolini and hitler were somewhat irritated at illustrious toronto had been a rather rude shock and pretty much the direct order to the commander of flight core 10 was to sink the illustrious that was his primary goal disrupting the reinforcement of malta was a nice secondary objective but illustrious was what they wanted so to that end they sent stukas heinkel one ones and ju-88s to sicily they built out of uh floating boys and uh streamers and the likes just off the coast an outline of illustrious hull and they practiced bombing it um that was such was the intent of getting illustrious it was revenge basically from the moment illustrious left and forth a left alexandria uh the um the shadow was began to follow and the formers look the problem with the former was if it wasn't already in position over the fleet it had difficulty intercepting the um fast ju-88s in particular but also the italian reconnaissance aircraft because it needed the speed of a dive it had atrocious climbs climb rate but it had a very good dive rate so on those instances when the um shadowers were spotted while there was a cap up it would often get shot down if the shadower was spotted before the full mars were in position it would be able to make a pass over the fleet and head back home there's a few shadowers maybe a few scattered attacks by the odd odd bomber here or there but but nothing that they couldn't handle up until the uh the the the main event shall we say when the main event was yeah january 10. the the two days prior to that it was mostly just uh the odd reconnaissance and from memory there might have been a small raid here or there yes but it was all very um piecemeal up until that point january 10 was definitely the day when uh illustrious and a and to a point arc royal and renowned and uh force h we're in range of the shorter range aircraft such as the ju 87s and the um the hindquarters and their torso yeah and of course so this is when the the main event happens when uh i think it's something like two to three squadrons of flight corps 10 in stukas show up pretty much at the same time yes but that's that happens halfway through the day so there'd been already been a fair bit of action going on in a day beforehand and that's fairly important to the to the way the story unfolded very much like midway the way that um it wasn't just one event that uh saw the japanese overwhelmed it was a string of events and the consequences of that string of events that uh brought them to their knees with illustrious it was a fairly similar situation where she her aircraft had been in action since dawn and the particularly feliga corten but they were leading the op that day knew this and they planned this and they planned for illustrious to be worn down by the time of their main attack okay so it was a constant series of attacks to presumably to string out the full mars to run them out of ammo maybe damage or shoot some of them down before before the big event uh yes in a round about where yes so from dawn again the shadows began uh to arrive and yes uh illustrious would be sending up her former so it's important to remember that this point of the war is we're literally only uh 13 14 months into the war um they had learned a few lessons from uh for carrier operations of norway they'd learned that anti-aircraft guns weren't as effective as they thought they were they'd learnt the value of um fighter direction from a guy with a chalkboard sitting in the signals office of hmisark royal attempting to do fighter direction so these things that all have been learnt in paper but weren't necessarily hadn't necessarily soaked their way through the entire fleet so with uh um illustrious she was sitting between um valiant and warspite the illustrious uh captain and command staff weren't really happy with this they'd actually asked admiral cunningham for them for the carrier to be positioned some 30 miles further south a bit further away from the main fleet to give their radar operators a bit more time for warnings for incoming but cunningham was thinking well this is the famous illustrious we've had nothing but trouble for so long um we need a hero ship to make everyone feel better so having illustrious in sight of the convoys and so forth cunningham thought was an important boost for morale so that that sort of set things up um to not be ideal for illustrious in the first place but you know she went into the 10th doing her thing her swordfish she had two squadrons of swordfish and one squadron of four mars reinforced squadronal four mars which was 15 aircraft so again that's another part of the whole early war situation where the thought was the ideal mix for a carrier was one-third fighters two-third bombers naturally by the time he gets 1945 it's the opposite it's either two-thirds fighters and one-third bombers or all fighter bombers um but what worse than that the battle of britain six months earlier had destroyed the fleet air arms um depot at coventry so they didn't have spare parts they didn't have spare airframes they only had what they had and it was just about now that those spares were starting to run out so by the time that illustrious was in action on the 10th her 15 full mars were down to 12. and she would send up flights of four to five full mars as part of her umbrella and each time a flight went up if a formula got damaged or if something happened it wasn't as easy to turn it around to get it back up again so so there there's there's some underlying issues there with maintaining the the air cover yes and so that's you know a combination of uh pilot fatigue but also aircraft fatigue because they simply couldn't um keep as many of them operational as they wanted so you know there was several uh encounters with um uh shadowers one at least one of them from memory was shot down others came and went but um you know by the time uh it was noon that had a busy morning shall we say the swordfish had been sent off for an airstrike against a italian convoy that had been spotted and the full mars had been trying to disrupt anything that was over illustrious or the convoys and this was the scenario that the flight core 10 had anticipated and they decided to make it even and they had pre-planned to make it even more um to exploit the situation even further so they sent in a flight of italian torpedo bombers low level came in under the radar got detected very close to the fleet and naturally the the order went out you know dive dive dive go and get these um get these torpedo bombers the four mars i think there was four or five above the fleet at them at that time um traded their one big advantage height to get down low to try and disrupt these torpedo bombers the tourbillon to peter obama's only turned out to be two there wasn't a major attack but it was only but those two was enough to pull the fighters down the fighters were only able to engage those torpedo bombers after they dropped their torpedoes and then the fighters fixated on those two torpedo bombers and chased it off towards pantarella the island nearby which was a small island nearby which had an italian airfield so that drew the full mars down and also drew them away from the fleet naturally this was plan with this being planned as that was happening the ju 87s and heinkels were launching and preparing um getting for creating their formations over sicily so it was about quarter past 12 when these began to be picked up on radar and illustrious fighter control operators realized that uh they were in trouble so this this is yeah i mean there's shades of midway i think to a certain extent there with the with the fighters being drawn down to the low level to deal with torpedo bombers um thus opening the ship up for dive bomber attack but as compared to midway where that all seems to have been a little bit of a happy accident at least as far as the us navy is concerned in this case this is actually a deliberate deliberate ploy by flight corps 10 specifically to decoy away any fighter cover that the carrier might have before they go in with the big punch yes it was definitely well apparently the from my reading i haven't actually been able to find many german documents myself but um every indication from multiple sources is that yes it was part of a plan you've got to remember that flight core 10 was germany's specialist anti-shipping unit and it was also the core that was had been planned to provide the aircraft and air crew for graf zeppelin so they had a good idea of what they were doing and they'd also been in practice they'd also had experience off norway and in the north sea so they knew how to deal with moving ships and they knew how to deal with fighter cover by this stage so they put all that experience into effect then we get to now to the point when when the big formation starts starts arriving and the bombs start falling so perhaps a little bit more even before that so as you were saying with midway um this is where you know at every point in the war up to here and after for several more years to come this was where the pre-war war games were put to the test this is where the doctrine that came out of those world games was put to the test so here is illustrious sitting between valiant and warspite the admiral is a board i think it was valiant and valiant is therefore the flagship so every time illustrious wanted to turn into the wind to launch aircraft it had to get permission from the flagship now it's one of those things that you just don't probably don't really realize the significance of until a situation like this arises so the fighter control officers of um illustrious were frantically trying to get in touch with the flagship saying look we've got a replace the cap was supposed to be replaced at 12 45 it's 12 15 we need to get the replacement cap up straight away so that means we've got to turn into the wind half an hour earlier well it took 15 minutes to get a response from the flagship and that meant that those reserve fighters which were on the deck supplemented by a couple more which were quickly pulled up from the hangar as they detected the incoming raid um were sitting there warming up and the last route was waiting for permission to turn into the wind now we me basically after this action the carrier becomes the flagship regardless and dictates when the the fleets turn into the wind but because of that there was a delay in getting these slow climbing full mars into the sky okay so then there i believe at the time that the german formation shows up there's there's still full mars trying to get off the deck at that point they they're there if there are four miles taking off and there's also a replacement um eddie anti-submarine patrol of swordfish as well so literally as the bombs um first begin to burst around and on illustrious the last aircraft is taking off from her deck so they there are several first-person accounts of the pilots of these aircraft saying you know that they they're lifting off the front of the ship they look over their shoulder and they see the first bomb hit illustrious one of them i believe it was a swordfish was actually still on the deck just powering past the island when the first bomb fell into the aft lift well where of course that swordfish had just been sitting warming up its engine that must have been fun um yeah i suppose it's important to uh to to remember at this point as you say that we're not talking about illustrious purely acting as a as the defense fighter defense carrier she's in the middle of running fighter defense and anti-submarine operations and maritime strike all at the same time and she's she's now having to perhaps refocus a little bit more on the self-defense aspect so so the bombs are starting to fall i need to mention the first one's hitting the lift so roughly speaking what what's the sequence of damage and how how how is this affecting the ship as as the bombs continue to rain down so initially essentially it's about five bomb hits all within the matter of one or two minutes um it's this the situation is actually somewhat chaotic um but also not as bad as it could have been because the fighters that had been sent off after the uh two torpedo bombers had been recalled but it was taking them time to get back uh half of them had run out of ammunition the other half had some ammunition left uh they all get back as the attack is unfolding um so you get you've got full mars diving into the ju-87s doing mock attacks because they haven't got any ammunition in the wild hope of scaring it out of the ju-87s and causing them to drop their bombs in order to escape and that seems to happen on at least one or two occasions that the 8j-87s are diverted from their attack by these unarmed formats um down on the ship itself it's attempting to evade um but that the hits just um come one after the other one goes through the bow and explodes underneath the bow it passes through the flight deck and explodes underneath the bow that floods forward section starts fires in the forward section in the paint blockers and the likes another lands immediately in front of the bridge this is appears to have been an anti-personnel bomb designed specifically to um well intended specifically to kill anti-aircraft gunners and it does that very well in this case it destroys one of the uh what the octuple pom-pom mounts and um jams the one in front of it these are the two immediately in front of the bridge another passes through um the pom-pom mount on the side of the ship on the opposite side of the ship bounces off the side of the hull and explodes right alongside on the water line um and another one or two go into the afterfoil where one of the full mars which had failed to start was going down the hangar back into going down the lift back into the hangar so that's that hit is probably where most of the early carnage came in yeah it's pretty much and i know it's perhaps the term a lucky hit is a little bit overused in some circumstances but that is a that is a very lucky hit because you've got to hit the that the lift itself which you know there's a small percentage of the carrier's overall the deck space the overall target area and then not only if you hit the lift you hit the lift while there's an aircraft on it and then not only have you hit a lift with an aircraft on it you've also managed to hit one get score hit just at the moment when that lift is on its way down and therefore it's not forming a seal with the with the armored armored hangar with the part of the flight deck that's armored above the hangar um and so the blast effect is much more easily translatable into the into the hangar itself yes um luck certainly plays a part in it because ultimately no less than three bombs go down that aft uh hanger that aft lift will um yeah it's it's frust it would have been frustrating i suppose on one level because you've got this nice big armored deck and you've got three four five bombs that hit just outside of that armored deck but you've also got to remember it's not just an armored deck what makes the royal navy's aircraft carriers different from any other aircraft carrier including other armoured carriers is that it's not an armored deck as such it's an armored hangar so it's got three inches of armor on the top four and a half inches of armor on the side and four and a half inch armored roller doors in front and behind the uh forward and aft lifts okay so yes it's very much an enclosed box effectively almost like almost like a battleship citadel but just slightly thinner and much higher that's right yes and it's it's also designed to protect the ship from the hangar as much as it's designed to protect the hangar from bombs and that yeah i suppose that makes a lot of sense when you yeah when you think about the kind of what damage well a a hangar full of aircraft explosives and fuel is going to be quite quite the inferno as would be seen later in the war on places like uh franklin and bunker hill um and even earlier than that and in this case it was quite quite an inferno here as well so and this is why um this is what this is what drew my interest to this in the first place was hearing or reading those comparisons one or two sentences to illustrious and thinking hang on that doesn't make sense why was it so different for illustrious versus franklin versus bunker hill versus intrepid and that's where you start to get into this uh the you know the doctrine of the armored box hangar right so we we've taken taken the several hits we've got a few going off in the in the lift well so what what's now happening to illustrious with with all these hits going on so um basically the explosions in the aft lift well they don't have the armored hat doors closed because they were in the process of launching aircraft um so again it's that whole midway situation of not being as prepared as you would like to be um the blasts rip through the hangar and the hangar is divided into three sections by uh fire curtains but these curtains are actually steel roller shutters again it's one of those uh instances where you suddenly realize oh dear this isn't as good an idea as we thought it was pre-war those steel shutters fragment and spear through the hangar um in thousands of red-hot splinters um cutting through aircraft cutting through equipment and cutting through hangar crew it was those hits which pretty much put uh illustrious out of action as a carrier because of of that the extent of damage it also um caused the forward lift to pop up um but it set off the fires and the aft hanger most intensely but it was also about this point after those first bombs went through the rear lift that last ruse's armored deck was it self-pierced okay so yeah this is this is probably very important so what exactly it's the the carrier with enough force to to blow through three and a half inches of deck plating because that's similar deck plating to what's present on a lot of battleships a lot of the older battleships at this period oh this is where a lot of the confusion comes in and i think the fault or the cause of this confusion is britain's stricter secrecy provisions post-war so immediately after the action when illustrious makes it back to malta spoiler alert she makes it back to malta um her captain sends off a damage report to the admiralty in london and in that damage report he gives a fairly detailed list of what happened but he blanket attributes all of the bomb hits to 1 000 500 kilogram bombs and unfortunately most historians have focused on that report after illustrious was made her way to the united states united states naval engineers went over the ship centimeter by centimeter pulling out every piece of bomb fragment every measuring every bomb hole doing the whole forensic analysis thing because they wanted to learn about the realities of war so did the royal navy and it wasn't a 1 000 kilogram bomb sorry it wasn't a 1 000 pound bomb it was a 1 000 kilogram bomb 2 200 um pound the germans have got a variety of that size generally they're called eso i think um very big a ju 87b could barely carry them ju-88s could carry them and there's video footage of them being wheeled around the runways in sicily at that time so we know that they were there it was one of these was was dropped dead accurately on the center line hit the deck must have been dropped quite low because its penetration wasn't as deep as would have been expected um in a burst just above the uh hangar floor which was itself one inch armor stick plate um tore through that and these subsequently the the fragments went through into the engine room into the fuel tanks um but most importantly it um destroyed and set on fire the four point the aft 4.5 inch conveyor belt for ammunition ah now that's uh that's that's a little bit concerning um i suppose that that does make it does make sense in in terms of the overall obviously the clear expertise that flight corp 10 has put into this attack as you said they've they've been dropping off um anti-personnel weapons to take out the anti-aircraft gunners so it makes perfect sense that they would have deployed a variety of bombs presumably probably staggered in the order of their aircraft so that they can disrupt the illustrious ability to defend herself before then trying to land a knockout punch with heavier weapons that obviously the ju-87 is not quite as agile well it's not it's not the world's most agile or fast aircraft in the first place but sticker stick a one-ton bomb under it and it's even worse so having that coming in maybe uh a few a few aircraft down the line after some of the aaa guns have been knocked out makes a lot of sense and it appears that's exactly what happened because it's the the initial hits do seem to have been uh contact fused uh on to hit to explode on the deck and as you say the big bomb was one of the one one of the last ones again we're only talking a matter of minutes but still that's what i took for yeah we were talking 40 50 um ju 87s up there and high altitude huncles um as well um you know adding to the effects so yeah it wasn't a minor raid um by anyone's account yeah and and obviously yes with when you've got that many j87s from multiple squadrons you can you can probably work out okay this will be our heavy punch squadron this will be our anti i'll clear the deck squadron and we'll make sure they dive first and things like that now with with the um the bomb detonating obviously as you say fragments and explosion uh explosive effects do reach right down into the ship what would likely have been the effect if the armored deck uh the armor flight deck hadn't been there because obviously that almost certainly would have initiated the fuse on the bomb and slowed it down somewhat uh so so if that armor hadn't been present or maybe had been present on the on the hangar deck floor how much further could that bomb have gotten and how much more i guess i guess that's a 64 million quest question isn't it um as you say the the difference here is that the the the armor is up higher so as you said that slows the bomb down uh higher um in this instance it detonated about three or four feet above the hangar deck um so and that's becau you know i guess that is because of the um it being slowed that fraction of a second so i would imagine that if the three-inch deck was on the hanger deck it would have had a a good chance of if not penetrating that deck at least um detonating in that deck in that term deck so look i i my personal non-engineer perspective is is that yes it probably would have breached and detonated in the um maybe the wardroom underneath not maybe probably not the actual engine spaces themselves but if it if it exploded in the wardroom underneath the hangar then there's only your standard sort of bulkheads to your between it and the um the bowels of the ship yeah so potentially a lot more explosive effect being then vented down through and again you know this is a 1 000 kilogram bomb it's it's um a little bit deceptive in that in that a lot of that weight is in its um hardened casing so it's so his warhead isn't isn't necessarily massive but it certainly means that that the warhead that it does have gets delivered to where you want it to be uh whereas whereas a 500 pound bomb contact fuse that detonates on the deck very thin casing but a lot of explosive for the for the blast effect so almost like the difference between armor piercing and high explosive battleship shells very much so exactly the same um concept exact same principle exact same physics yes this is uh sort of the the big hit as it were so and as we said with that that's hit the that's gone through to the engine spaces so what happens to illustrious now presumably it's losing speed okay well it's only fragments that go to the engine spaces so the engines actually are actually okay um okay so the there's not a lot going on there um the engine spaces are filling with smoke there are fires raging on the decks above the engine engine spaces and very quickly we're talking you know 60 degrees centigrade i'm not sure what that is fahrenheit temperatures so you've got crews basically having to douse themselves in water from the distillers to keep themselves going some of them are passing out in the heat all of them are ordered to stay at this station keep the ship going so yeah it's illustrious manages to maintain 25 knots if not more pretty much the whole action but the intensity of the hits in the stern um lift well and several near misses right on the stern as well causes the rudder space to flood so the the the the um main uh rudder control room right my rudder power room floods and illustrious loses control loses power to her rudder so as the attack is unfolding so there's there are still follow-up attacks at this point and uh she's lost control so she's having to frantically put up the signals you know um i'm not under control uh to warn uh valiant and war spike to get out of her way right yeah and of course with with the rudder disabled that makes evasion a little bit more difficult as well yes um it's a situation where they get it going again for a short bit of time through basic damage control then they lose control after five or ten minutes they turn on the auxiliary motors for the rudder which is steam powered they also fail after a few minutes so what eventually happens is they get it going long enough to jam the rudder and midships so that it's not turning the ship left or right or star water port and they are then able to um steer the ship on um engine alone so by varying the screw speeds on the different sides that's right yes yeah so that occupies them for at least an hour trying to get steerage back so there's a bit of a lull here um after that major attack um but there's you know there are still more reconnaissance coming and going her full mars could not land because there's a great big crater where the aft lift was then the front lift is buckled upwards so illustrious has the capacity to land aircraft over the bow but not in this instance because the forward lift is a a roadblock so they are diverted and also they're surviving the swordfish that are up they defer to malta where they refuel and come back um when possible to provide what measure of cap they can okay so that although the carrier itself is disabled the air group is still doing something to to try and defend it against possible follow-ups yeah so i think there's somewhere between seven and eight of her formers were up in the air at the time that she was disabled and uh most of those get to malta um where they you know commonality they just strap pack in the 303 ammunition from which is the same as being used by the hurricanes there at that time um refuel grab a drink of water and fly back um they provide patchy cover for the rest of the afternoon okay and of course the the important thing is after this lull the the trouble for illustrious doesn't end after this main attack wave is over does it that they keep coming back so you've got the ship that's uh it's still that the fire is largely contained to the hangar largely contains the aft end of the hangar because alastair's has three sets of salt water sprayers inside the hangar so the offset is is knocked out by the bomb hit but the middle set and the forward set are activated by the uh action station personnel um most of the hangar crew are dead a few get out um and this is when they naturally are fighting the fires they're trying to stop the fires from spreading to the rest of the ship there's some concern about the fires and the forward and the bow because they're not far from the forward 4.5 inch magazines and the fire in the back of the ship is pretty much out of control and it's fairly hard for anyone to get back there because it's just a tangled mass of steel so all through this time illustrious manages to maintain electrical power most of the time except for a few scary flickers um the telephone network which is run through um armored trunking inside the ship is also still mostly working so the damage control personnel are able to keep in touch with their different parties and the ship is doing the best it can to get to malta but as you say um the luftwaffe who initially thought that it would just take four bomb hits to sink illustrious have just seen five bomb hits and she's not sinking so they they are out for her blood and yes there's a several more follow-up attacks one by the italian um stickers uh which presses its attack it's not as coordinated as the initial attack which is pretty much just as well but they still managed to land another bomb hit in the aft lift well the will have painted a bull's eye on that and the way this is going well yeah there must have been a magnet underneath it or something um but that that explosion unfortunately kills a large number of the damage control personnel fighting the fires in the hangar and another explosion a near-miss from this attack kills a lot of the damage control plus medical personnel on the ship's quarter deck at the very stern of the ship treating patients and also attempting to control the fires back there okay so she she's still under attack but as you said earlier spoiler alert she does actually make it to malta um yes so you know for the for the rest of the afternoon from this will start at about quarter past 12. the rest of the afternoon there's high altitude attacks from you know high uncles or italian bombers there's a couple of um attacks from stukas and yeah she's but she's still motoring along at 25 knots and still able to steer she's got a couple of destroyers in accompaniment uh valiant turned war spikes stay for a good amount of time before they have to break off and go and look after the rest of the convoy but even as she's pulling into malta and and the sun is pretty much going below the horizon there's another attack or attempted attack by two aircraft they're not seen by this point after the initial bomb attack there's only the forward 4.5 inch mounts working and half pom-poms they sort of get an idea as to where these um bombers are lay down a barrage and successfully scare it off so then you know it's there's there's valletta harbor she gets pulled in she's still burning burning heavily and you know there are reports from the maltese standing on the dock so they could see her aft hole glowing orange from the heat that's that's quite quite a bit of temperature because as you said the the uh the hole is the hanger is armored so that's a lot of heat to uh to build up to to make a four and a half inch thick belt glow i'm not sure if that's that there was also heavy fire behind the aft lift so around the um quarter deck and the other spaces so it could have been there but um yes look we the there were four three or four four miles in the back part of the hangar and there was a lot of spare stores and components in the roof of the hangar and these continued to burn um until about three o'clock in the morning it took that long even with the help of the dockyard to put the fire out in the aft hanger but it was contained to that space by that those that four and a half inches of steel on the sides um and these the sprinklers in the forward section of the hangar in fact apparently the swordfish at the front end of the hangar apart from having a few holes torn in them from the flying splinters were able to be returned to service at a later date okay that's uh that's quite interesting um so she's in malta now um but as as i understand it they the germans aren't giving up even the sunset there's a new day she's being repaired in malta um but they're still trying to finish the job yeah i imagine there's a lot of you know shouting going on um why has this ship not sunk after being hit six or seven times by this stage um so at this point flicker core 10 isn't really prepared to attack malta because it's only just arrived in that in january um and its specific mission initially was to go for the illustrious so they have to spend the day getting themselves organized and prepared briefed on on malta um illustrious crew gets taken off only her gunners remain on board and a lot of very courageous maltese dockyard workers are desperately trying to shore up the back of the ship desperately trying to get through the hot steel to find out what's wrong with the rudder and patch up the holes in her stern and in her bow i'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to be a diver in the water with bombs falling into the water around you but that's what these people were doing to guarantee that they could get illustrious up and running again as quickly as possible okay so yeah that's um continued action for illustrious even though the even though she's actually in harbor yes it's a constant bombardment um not constantly there's waves of bombardment uh so uh hmas perth with australian light cruiser was tied up opposite and you know she was there her accounts of the attacks are just fairly extraordinary of of the stukas diving through the dust and to the um the bombers just carpet bombing the area trying to get her one large bomb detonates right alongside of illustrious and caves in a large part of her side and another bomb lands right on the stern again so at this point the illustrious stern is basically only hanging in place by a few electrical cables probably because it's just been hit so many times they were seriously concerned that at its at its um structural integrity so multi dockyard workers frantically tried to you know brace it up as quickly as they could but those two hits again you know weren't critical they hurt they fractured a lot of fuel tanks they knocked engines out of their mountings they set new fires in the stern but the ship had been evacuated at this point and nothing desperate it was broken okay so then with that presumably though they managed to patch the ship back into some form of seaworthy state but she obviously can't stay there and malta is not equipped to completely refit her anyway so this is basically the first malta blitz it's called the illustrious blitz and it's the first uh of the you know of what was to come for the next two or three years attack after attack after attack on the town the harbour the shipping anything at the the airfields it was it was the start of the whole the the high intensity attacks on malta so yeah after several days they get illustrious up to a point where she can um she's watertight and they she's got she's detailed to head out to sea and meet up with some cruisers and get an escort back to alexandria so she races out of harbor at high speed uh in such a hurry that apparently she didn't even bother to haul in the mooring lines and makes her way out at you know 25 26 knots so fast that she bypassed her escort and continued to race on towards malta um fortunately because she was moving so fast she wasn't spotted she hasn't got operational aircraft at this point she's basically just a a moving hulk um she races along but i think the engineers sort of pushed it a bit too hard and she has a bit of a breakdown which would have been a bit nerve-wracking for a while they realized that um most of her bunker oil is contaminated uh they frantically try and clear some of those bunkers get rid of some of the water um eventually she pulls into alexandria harbour with no less no more than 60 tons worth of um usable oil fuel aboard in terms of um you know tense dramatic actions uh you know this this is right up there from it's just it's just relentless day after day after day of survival um of action of of uh combat through to mechanical uh challenges this the story of the illustrious is is extraordinary and it's really quite quite incomprehensible that's uh not a much more celebrated tale yeah it's um it's certainly certainly a tale of significant endurance and of course the fact that despite the fact of having basically had a stern near enough blown into oblivion she's able to still head out under her own power to to alexandra and thence obviously round around the entirety of africa to america for her final repairs when she does make it from alexandria via via the sewers canal to states for her repairs this is obviously where the the [Music] more full evaluation of the damage that we mentioned earlier was conducted so what what's the outcome of this repair and presumably refit that she gets and roughly how quickly is she back in action so it takes a fair while to get her to the united states several months um once she gets to the united states of course the united states doesn't have plans it's not easy for norfolk navy yard to repair it because you've got to remember the british use different standards of everything from bolts bolt styles to thread styles to fittings to attachments they have their own set of standards which is not the same set of standards as united states navy so everything has to be adapted on the fly her plans have to be flown out uh they have to you know there's it's not like they have the templates for any of the equipment there or the to build from so it's it's a fairly yeah it's not as fast as you would like necessarily because it's fairly bespoke work i suppose for the united states navy navy yards but they do an incredibly fast job they do an incredibly good job um and you know she's back um in action [Music] oh i think it's after after she gets to norfolk it's probably five or six months i think before she's back in the united states from memory i'll have to double check that but um it offer it often seems like a lot longer because people don't take into account the transit time it took to get her there from alexandria and then for her to get back from the united states to the uk but it still is a longer repair time than say you know a u.s carrier being hit in the pacific because it's just not that they just don't have the equipment to do the job but there's also another reason for it this is the first major carrier battle of the war involving dive bombers and the like where they've got forensic evidence they can analyze so there's an awful lot to be learned from this action and there's no doubt about it that the us navy and royal navy engineers did everything they could to learn from this action so you'll see on my website the i've reproduced um the damaged the extensive after-action uh um damage control report that was formed in norfolk naval yard uh extensive photographs which show you just the extent of the damage inside the ship how the stern is just basically a twisted mess um and the drawings showing all the different the different uh angles and locations and extensive damage and they did this because they needed to learn they needed to learn what to expect next and illustrious provided that in spades her you know her gunnery officers were cross-examined in great detail about what was it like facing dive bomber attacks this is one you know this is the first dive bomber attack against an aircraft carrier at of any point um you know the the um merits of the the the hangar for the fire curtains you know the rules will re-examine so after this the fire curtains got stripped out of all the british carriers and we're replaced with asbestos fabric okay so if the whereas the steel would kill you instantly the asbestos would just destroy your lungs the rest of your life but at least they wouldn't shatter from the compression of an explosion um yeah but at the same time it also proved a lot of royal navy doctrines such as draining fuel fuel lines there were no out at no point was there an out of control fuel fire even though the ship was on fire from bow to stern essentially um you know the royal navy carriers wasted a lot of people say an awful lot of space by encapsulating its fuel aviation fuel canisters in tanks full of seawater well that was in order to stop shock from explosions transmitting into the um aviation fuel containers and also if the aviation fuel did breach then it was going into a an area already full of liquids so it wouldn't disperse as rapidly so none of those thick things were um all those things worked and i've just been shot by my daughter again yes my daughter likes to shoot me with her nerf gun whenever i'm doing these podcasts um yeah things like um you know the the the the value of the spray the salt water spray isn't the hangers yeah okay so it meant that they had to clean the radios and the like but the fires as wild as they were in the aft hangar did not extend forward again you know um allowing the ship's crew to get to rally and fight back um the way that the the whole the layers of the protection in the hull kept the engine room um pretty much space for everything but this a few small splinters that you got through to fuel the oil fuel tanks um the all these measures worked and as i mentioned before the explosion on the 4.5 inch conveyor belts well that itself was armored and ultimately in the intensity of the heat only one 4.5 inch shell detonated in that space um whereas it could have been so much worse if the rest of the conveyor section had had lit up so it it while there's an awful lot of weight in that equipment in this particular worst case scenario it's demonstrated that yes it could save a ship yeah and i suppose that's the thing is it's the the ship is the ship survives and the ship survives in a state that it's repairable and can be returned to the front lines and you know alastair was there until the end fighting in um of okinawa um having a even had a kamikaze clip it um unfortunately the detonation of the uh kamikaze in the water alongside of illustrious sort of reopened some of those wounds from the bent frames that the cracked frames uh and caused her to start to vibrate fairly seriously so at that point once formidable arrived she was sent back home but even then she was able to maintain station shaking crazily until her relief vessel arrived hmm i suppose that's the thing isn't it at the end of the day she she's back in action she sees out the rest of the war as we said and she manages to put in a lot of good service in between uh this attack and and obviously her subsequent encounter with kamikazes later on i i yes the thing is is that um you've got to remember that um britain at this point is under siege um you've got u-boats sinking as much shipping coming in as that can you've got bombers attacking its industrial centers it can't mass-produce carriers like um the united states can it attempts to do so with the light fleet carriers but you know even those are delayed so it needs what it's got to go the distance and i think that's probably part of the reasoning behind these ships is um the knowledge that um they can't be replaced quickly so we need to keep them going as long as we can um that and the fact that as um dr alexander clark was saying the other day they were designed also to fight in the pacific which is half a world away from its supply support base support facilities so it had to be able to fight in the pacific survive in the pacific and get home from the pacific if necessary yeah and i suppose the the fact that the the japanese tended to carry somewhat lighter bombs than a than a thousand kilogram armor piercing unit probably would have stood there fairly good stead at that point well when the last race was designed in uh 36 i think it was the standard bomb being used by all the world was 500 pounds um the royal air force said i will never carry anything bigger than that against the ship because of range well naturally engine power was developing so quickly um that was soon proven wrong but yeah again it's it's it's a strategic game where if you've got an armored deck you know you have to carry a bigger bomb thus the ju-87 is carrying the thousand kilogram bomb two thousand two hundred pounds um but it could only carry that in a short radius and that radius was barely malta so it's only because illustrious went that close to malta that it exposed itself to that way to bomb if elasticity was further out she would have only been in range of the ju 87rs which could only carry 500. pound bombs so it's it this is the trade-off that um is inherent in any form of um naval doctrine or it a doctrine for that matter um yeah so yes it's a trade-off how you as you say how closer you get to the enemy the more they can throw at you but that's right at the same time you you you can then get closer to the enemy in this case um i mean yeah you don't come out a bit without a few scars but you at least just not the bottom of the sea well there's no doubt that cunningham made a mistake here in sending last year's that close um but like you say i don't think he was expecting uh anyone to be carrying a 1000 kilogram bomb uh at that point yeah and i suppose at the same time as well as obviously there's there's a lot to be said for the durability and uh capability of the illustrious a fair bit has to be put um a fair bit of credit has to go to the commanders and pilots of league of corp 10 who set up this multi-stage very complicated i might add multi-stage attack multiple forms of ammunition and payload specifically geared to taking down the defenses um and then hitting a carrier like this very hard and obviously they didn't quite succeed in putting it down but there's no doubt about that yeah i'm sure that cunningham would have loved to have had two fleet carriers um in the following year but he only had formidable um and yeah if if last year's had been there with a middle at matapan well it might have been a much a different outcome there so you know it's uh yeah it's this there's multiple layers of um success and a defeat involved in these things uh a mission kill is often just as valuable as a a hard kill yeah and it and it's it's although obviously she would have still been hit but it's it's probably relatively safe to say she wouldn't have been quite as badly off if it had been the kind of uh general swarming attack with 500 with sort of general purpose and semi armor piercing 500 pounders which is what everyone expected and which was quite often the case in a number of other carrier engagements when dive bombers came into play uh yeah for sure but um again it's just so hard to say isn't it you know her entire deck wasn't armored it was only the area containing the uh you know the volatiles so yeah she still had as was shown in this action that she had achilles heel the stern was torn up her bowel was hurt but it wasn't you know done in um so you look yeah it all it takes is just a lucky hit and i think that happened you know that's evidenced in in so many actions it just everything just depends on where that bomb or that shot lands and in this instance um several bombs landed exactly where feliga corten would have loved them to um however a few too many landed in the one spot those bombs to have scattered themselves around me further around the ship yeah yeah there's only so much you can kill in one part of a ship before everything's dead yes yeah yeah okay well that's that's pretty pretty comprehensive i think very interesting and obviously with pointing out both uh how she ended up in the situation she did and and the aftermath of it so once again thank you very much for lending your time and support for this video and uh great fun i'm more than happy to do so again there's plenty of other actions and uh um you know damage reports and the like for the royal navy's um fleet carriers are equally interesting and equally um forgotten shall we say yeah and i'm sure i'm sure we'll be coming back to this at uh at some point in the future and for obviously for those of you who've uh haven't visited his website as i said earlier please do um armored carriers uh there'll be a link in the description and also be linking through to the to the youtube channel which has quite a number of very interesting uh videos with using narrated accounts from the survivors of various engagements which is very definitely worth a watch so please do go watch and subscribe and such like because we need as much naval history good good reliable naval history as we can on the out in the various media formats and this is that's definitely one of them and thank you very much for your fantastic work as well it's been a pleasure following your material for the past couple of years so um keep it up thank you very much i fully intend to and uh yeah so for everyone who's listening i hope you enjoyed that and i hope to see you again in another video thank you bye that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 177,030

Keywords: wows, world of warships, HMS Illustrious, Operation Excess, Fliegerkorps X, armoured carriers, Royal Navy, Luftwaffe, Fulmar, Swordfish, Stuka

Id: H5bTn5dUJ2A

Length: 65min 28sec (3928 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020