![]() ![]() ![]() The death toll of 1,519 exceeded any of the other great British naval disasters of the war. When Norwegian vessels finally found them nearly three days later, only 40 remained alive. Hour after hour men waited in the water and in open rafts as their shipmates slipped away around them. The British, on the other hand, unaware that the three ships had been lost until the following day, even continued to radio orders to them until the Germans announced the sinkings. Despite saluting their gallant foes, the German battleships did not stop to pick up survivors. Some 900 men went into the cold, northern waters that evening and they faced a horrifying ordeal. Aboard Scharnhorst a film crew recorded the action and Glorious became perhaps the first major Royal Navy ship whose demise was seen in moving pictures, triumphantly displayed to the world only days later on the newsreel ' Die Deutsche Wochenschau'. By around 1820, the valiant Acasta, last of the British ships still afloat, which had torpedoed Scharnhorst in a last gasp attack, sank, blazing, beneath the waves. With no aircraft in the air to provide an early warning, and despite a heroic, Victoria Cross-nominated defensive performance by the destroyers, escape proved impossible. At 1545 they were spotted by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. In a remarkable feat of seamanship and flying, seven Hawker Hurricanes of 46 Squadron also managed to land on her flight deck: something previously thought impossible for high performance monoplanes, unadapted to naval work. She had been assigned to evacuate ten biplane Gloster Gladiator fighters of the RAF's 263 Squadron. The three British warships were taking part in Operation Alphabet, the evacuation of Allied forces from Norway that had been taking place simultaneously with the rather better known and remembered evacuation at Dunkirk.Īt 0300, Glorious and her escorts detached from Vice Admiral Lionel Wells' aircraft carrier squadron, which was covering the evacuation convoys on their journey back to Britain, and headed home. HMS Glorious, one of Britain's largest and fastest aircraft carriers, was sunk along with her escorting destroyers HMS Ardent and HMS Acasta. Late in the afternoon of June 8th, 1940, the Royal Navy suffered one of its most devastating defeats of the Second World War. ![]()
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