HMS Hermes The First Aircraft Carrier.
"The Hermes entered service in 1924. It was the world's first ship specially designed, commissioned and built as an aircraft carrier.

The 183-meter aircraft carrier was a technological marvel for its time and was an impressive sight: the island superstructure rose majestically above the flight deck, inscribed in the cruising contours of the bow of the hull. By the end of the 1930s, however, Royal Navy designers had identified the problem areas of the new class of warships and were creating designs for more powerful, larger, and faster aircraft carriers. Therefore, just one year before the outbreak of World War II, the Hermes was transferred to the Reserve Fleet as a training ship.


In August 1939, the Hermes was hastily returned to service. Until mid-1940 she was part of the search force engaged in hunting German raiders in the Atlantic. After the surrender of France, the Hermes planes distinguished themselves during the attack on the battleship Richelieu in Vichy government-controlled Dakar. After dropping torpedoes, the Hermes planes flew within a few meters of the battleship's superstructure. As a result of the attack, the mighty French ship was out of action for several months.

In 1941 the Hermes operated against the Italians off the coast of East Africa; in the Persian Gulf its planes took part in the suppression of the uprising in Iraq. Shortly after the end of the Iraq campaign, war was declared to the Allies by the Empire of Japan - Britain's position in South Asia was threatened. To help stop the Japanese "blitzkrieg," it was decided to transfer Hermes, which was being repaired in South Africa, to the Eastern Fleet based in British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). It was here that Hermes met her fate.


In early April 1942, Japanese Admiral Nagumo, commander of the attack aircraft carrier unit Kido Butai, which had carried out the raid on Pearl Harbor the previous December, made a massive raid on British possessions in the Indian Ocean. Churchill himself called the operation "the most dangerous moment of the war. Such a difficult situation developed after the Japanese swept through the East Indies, captured Hong Kong and Singapore, destroyed in battle the Allied naval forces they could scrape together in the Java Sea, all in just a few months.

Building on these decisive successes, Nagumo's strike force of five aircraft carriers put hundreds of aircraft into the air on April 5. The British were aware of the impending attack, yet the Japanese succeeded in sinking several warships and destroying the enemy's port facilities in Ceylon with minimal losses.


At noon on April 8, when the worst seemed to be over, the Hermes was in the port of Trincomalee. By that time the planes had already been unloaded from the ship and the aircraft carrier itself was being prepared for the operations to come. Suddenly the Hermes sirens blared. The entire crew was ordered back aboard and to take their places according to the combat schedule.

An intercepted message from the Japanese Navy contained information about an impending attack on Trincomalee. To avoid the fate of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, which had fallen easy prey to the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, the Hermes, accompanied by the destroyer HMAS Vampire, put to sea and laid in a southward course along the coast.

Early in the morning, a Japanese strike team typhooned the port of Trincomalee, sinking one ship and destroying shore facilities. Later that morning, a Japanese reconnaissance plane spotted the Hermes, which, escorted by the Vampire, was heading back north toward Trincomalee. Under Admiral Nagumo's orders, a strike group of 85 dive bombers took to the air with the aim of finally destroying the unruly ships of the Royal Navy. Leaving all of its aircraft on dry land, the Hermes could rely only on its own limited air defenses and on air support from the British air force. This support, however, was too late and too weak to change the course of events.

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