RN Aircraft Carriers: Courageous Class 1928

[Brian James]

A Sopwith Camel 2F.1 pictured on a takeoff platform on Battlecruiser HMS Courageous off the Firth of Forth in 1918.

[Brian James]

Admiralty blueprints of Modified Courageous Class Battlecruiser HMS Furious dated 1915 and her subsequent Carrier conversion in 1918.

[Brian James]

Courageous Class Carrier HMS Glorious pictured in November 1932.

[Brian James]

HMS Courageous....1928..https://www.britishpathe.com/video/VLVA ... y/cruisers

[Brian James]

Lead Ship, Battlecruiser HMS Courageous pictured at Rosyth in April 1917 being fitted with minelayer rails. She was temporarily fitted as a Minelayer, by the addition of mine rails on her quarterdeck that could hold over 200 mines though she never actually laid any, these were removed in November.

[Brian James]

HMS Furious pictured under refit at Philadelphia Navy Yard in May 1941.

[Brian James]

HMS Furious pictured in August 1944 off the Orkney Islands, as she elevates one of her embarked Supermarine Seafires to the flight deck.

[Pelican]

Photo by Lt Harold Greene.
This is from one of the negatives found at auction, it shows a Fairey Swordfish (stringbag) coming in to land on HMS Courageous.

[Brian James]

Courageous Class Aircraft Carrier HMS Glorious pictured in 1935..After the start of the Second World War in 1939, Glorious spent the rest of the year unsuccessfully hunting for the commerce-raiding German Cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in the Indian Ocean before returning to the Mediterranean. She was recalled home in April 1940 to support operations in Norway. While evacuating British aircraft from Norway on June 8th 1940 she was sunk by the German Battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the North Sea with the loss of over 1,200 lives..The circumstances of the sinking were the subject of a debate in the House of Commons on January 28th 1999. After the existence of the Bletchley Park decoding of German transmissions was made public in the 1970s, Bletchley Park personnel revealed that they had told the RN of the German breakout. However, the RN refused to believe the codebreakers partly because they were for the most part civilians, and despite begging from the codebreakers, never notified the Glorious squadron of the German advance.

[Pelican]

The Royal Navy modified battlecruiser Courageous-class aircraft carrier HMS Furious lying at anchor at Spithead on 1 September 1925 off Portsmouth, United Kingdom.