HMS Eagle was an early aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy. Ordered by Chile during the South American dreadnought race as the Almirante Latorre-class battleship Almirantes Cochrane. In early 1918 she was purchased by Britain for conversion to an aircraft carrier. The ship was initially assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet and then later to the China Station. Eagle spent the first nine months of World War II in the Indian Ocean searching for German commerce raiders. She was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-73 on 11 August 1942 while escorting a convoy to Malta during Operation Pedestal.
About HMS Eagle (1918) in brief
HMS Eagle was an early aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy. Ordered by Chile during the South American dreadnought race as the Almirante Latorre-class battleship Almirantes Cochrane. In early 1918 she was purchased by Britain for conversion to an aircraft carrier; this work was finished in 1924. The ship was initially assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet and then later to the China Station. Eagle spent the first nine months of World War II in the Indian Ocean searching for German commerce raiders. She was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-73 on 11 August 1942 while escorting a convoy to Malta during Operation Pedestal. The Director of Naval Construction began preliminary design work even before the ship was purchased and submitted an outline design on 8 February 1918. This design had a full-length flight deck and its most distinctive features were the two islands separated by the flight deck. Each island was to be 110 feet long, containing two funnels and a tripod mast. Although they were staggered to make it more difficult for an enemy ship to estimate the ship’s course, they were to be connected to each other with heavy bracing. A crane was located at the end of each island to lift aircraft aboard and to recover seaplanes on the forecastle on the aft of the ship. Two tanks near the islands would allow the ship to refuel on the ready-to-use deck. Based on the battleship’s mixture of coal and fuel tanks, the converted oil tanks were used as oil tanks to be used as well as the shell rooms to be converted to oil.
The battleship retained the platform between the islands where the aircraft would be assembled before taking off. It was the fourteenth ship of the Navy to bear the name HMS Eagle and the first to be named after a British ship of that name, HMS Eagle, which was built in 1883-1884. The carrier was decommissioned in 1946 and sold for scrap in 1947. She is now listed as a museum ship in the National Museum of Naval History and Science, Greenwich, London, along with a number of other ships of the British Navy that were built before and during the First World War, including HMS Canada, HMS Cochrane, Almirante Latorre and HMS Olympic. The museum ship is now in the care of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It is the only ship of its kind to have been built in the UK during World War I and the only one to have survived the Second World War. In the 1930s, the ship served as a training ship for the Fleet Air Arm and was used to test new fighter aircraft. In 1940, she escorted convoys to Malta and Greece and attacked Italian shipping, naval units and bases in the Eastern Mediterranean. She also participated in the Battle of Calabria in July but her aircraft failed to score any hits when they attempted to torpedo Italian cruisers.
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