RN Aircraft Carriers: Classless

[Pelican]

H.M.S. ARGUS

GILLINGHAM-BASED HORACE ERRIDGE CELEBRATES 101ST BIRTHDAY WITH FAMILY AND ROYAL NAVY

The pandemic put the kibosh on larger celebrations to mark his centenary last year, so the big party was postponed until the former sailor’s 101st birthday.

Now Gillingham-based Horace Erridge was presented with a picture of the Royal Navy’s 5th generation aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth by Commander Rich Sturman, Commanding Officer of 845 Naval Air Squadron, from RNAS Yeovilton.

Horace joined the Royal Navy shortly after the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 and after training as a supply rating in Skegness and Lee-on-Solent, he was assigned to Britain’s first aircraft carrier HMS Argus at Greenock, working in the cipher room and he was also in charge of the air stores.

After missions to the Mediterranean, the carrier was dispatched to the Arctic in August 1941 on the first Russian convoy, delivering two dozen Hurricane fighters to Murmansk.

‘My job was keeping records and stores down in the lower deck and I saw very little of the Arctic. We were at action stations, but we were escorted by the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious and four destroyers and apart from rough seas it was really a quiet trip,’ Horace recalled.

‘On the way, a team of RAF technicians worked flat out assembling the aircraft and as we approached Murmansk we could hear them as each plane was safely flown off from our flight deck by RAF pilots to a Russian air base.’

Nearly 80 convoys followed the original, codenamed Dervish, until Nazi Germany was defeated in the spring of 1945.

Over 100 naval and merchant ships were sunk and more than 3,000 Allied seamen were lost as they delivered more than four million tons of vital supplies to the Soviet Union.

Argus never returned to the Arctic, but the Russian Government has decorated Horace three times for his service, medals he wears proudly on his jacket alongside six others presented by the UK Government for his World War 2 service.

Horace remained with Argus, which ran the no-less-dangerous gauntlet of the Malta convoys, as well as delivering aircraft to Gibraltar.

‘There was plenty of action in these operations,’ he said. ‘But we were lucky and were only damaged once, suffering casualties when a 1,000lb bomb hit the Argus off Tangiers. Among the many other actions, we saw the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat and we rescued about 600 of the crew.’

In quieter times, he played drums with the ship’s band and with Royal Marines musicians and enjoyed hockey.

He later served in West Africa and the Fleet Air Arm base at Inskip in Lancashire, where he met Hilda, a Petty Officer Wren who became his wife. He left the Navy in 1946 but remained a reservist.

Today he lives in his bungalow in Gillingham, still drives, and remains an active member of the local Probus Club which he’s been involved with since the early 1980s.

Photographed is Horace Erridge on his 101st Birthday on 27 July 2021 and HMS Argus during WW II.

[ivorthediver]

Bless him and hope he is around for a while longer yet , a real old salt if ever there was one .

[Brian James]

Pilots pictured awaiting zero hour to take off in the open bridge of Aircraft Carrier HMS Argus. The carrier HMS Eagle can be seen in the background, whilst operating in the Mediterranean as part of Force H in 1942...Argus was converted from an ocean liner that was under construction when the First World War began and became the first example of the standard pattern of Aircraft Carrier, with a full-length flight deck that allowed wheeled aircraft to take off and land. After commissioning, she was involved for several years in the development of the optimum design for other Aircraft Carriers. Argus also evaluated various types of arresting gear, general procedures needed to operate a number of aircraft in concert and fleet tactics. The ship was too top-heavy as originally built and had to be modified to improve her stability in the mid-1920s. She spent one brief deployment on the China Station in the late 1920s before being placed in reserve for budgetary reasons...Argus was recommissioned and partially modernised shortly before the Second World War and served as a Training Ship for deck-landing practice until June 1940. The following month she made the first of her many ferry trips to the Western Mediterranean to fly off fighters to Malta; she was largely occupied in this task for the next two years. She also delivered aircraft to Murmansk in Russia, Takoradi on the Gold Coast, and Reykjavík in Iceland. By 1942, the Royal Navy was very short of Aircraft Carriers and Argus was pressed into front-line service despite her lack of speed and armament. In June, she participated in Operation Harpoon, providing air cover for the Malta-bound convoy. In November, the ship provided air cover during Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa and was slightly damaged by a bomb. After returning to the UK for repairs, Argus was used again for deck-landing practice until late September 1944. In December, she became an Accommodation Ship and was listed for disposal in mid-1946. Argus was sold in late 1946 and scrapped the following year.

[Brian James]

HMS Argus pictured post her 1925/26 refit.

[Brian James]

HMS Argus pictured during her deployment with H Force, ferrying Hawker Hurricanes to Malta, accompanied by HMS Ark Royal...November 1940.

[Brian James]

HMS Ark Royal pictured on November 13th 1941.

[jbryce1437]

HMS Ark Royal pictured on November 13th 1941.

Many thanks Brian, I believe the photo was taken from HMS Legion.

Jim

[Pelican]

10 Worst Aircraft Carriers

https://hushkit.net/2022/12/05/10-worst ... -carriers/

[Pelican]

10 Worst Aircraft Carriers

https://hushkit.net/2022/12/05/10-worst ... -carriers/

RE: 10 Worst Aircraft Carriers

From Tim:

Argus was used in Op. Benedict, the despatch of two flights of hurricanes to Murmansk in August 1941, one of the strange features they used to try to get the hurricanes off the flight deck was to build a wooden ski ramp on the focsle end. The first two that took off left their undercarriage behind such was its beneficial effect. The other pilots just managed to clear the deck before reaching it. Just abaft the ramp was a hydraulic pilot house, like a garden shed that rose up when no flying and sunk down so its roof was flush with the deck when flying was in progress.

I know all this because my old friend Tim Elkington was one of the pilots who flew off Argus at that time, it was the defining moment of his life, even though he lived well into his 90s that 3 months flying out pf Vaenga, airfield of Murmansk, that time was tattooed onto his psyche. He had already fought in the BoB, he stayed in the RAF until retirement and even then stayed in his house at Little Rissington.

Here is a short film a friend in USA made for him never having seen Argus he used a US Woolworth carrier but it’s a lovely little film and captures the loneliness of a single seater over the sea with very limited nav capability.

https://vimeo.com/289507374/b4df17cfb7

Eric Carter, another pilot who went with that mission wrote a superb book called Force Benedict I would recommend to anyone interested, I got mine on Amazon. The main operation was “Dervish” arriving to Archangelsk on 31 August 1941 with 3 squadrons of Hurricanes and 500 RAF blokes to put them together and train the Russians to fly them. The convoys ultimately delivered over 3,000 hurricanes which did much better that the spitfires that went via the Persian route, these were much too fragile for the Russian airfields and broke swiftly.

[Pelican]

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