Flight Commander Frederick Joseph Rutland, DSC and Bar, flies Sopwith Pup #N6453 off a platform on the forward gun turret of HMS Yarmouth, June 1917. A few months later Lt. Bernard Smart would take off from the same launch ramp in #N6430 to shoot down Zeppelin L23. Note single Lewis machine gun angled to fire up through top wing aperture.

The Pup—official name “Scout”—was the first land-based fighter plane to operate off warships. Its single .303in Lewis machinegun was mounted on an angle to fire upward through the top wing aperture for anti-zeppelin work. Some had their wheels replaced with skids for shipboard landing tests; in action, most were simply ditched at sea. Shipbuilders William Beardmore and Co. also built up to 100 of their own version, the W.B. III, with internal flotation airbags and folding wings and undercarriage for shipboard stowage, but its performance was unequal to the Pup’s. Both were superseded by the 2F1 Ships Camel. Lt. Bernard Smart flew N6430 to shoot down Zeppelin L23 on August 21, 1917.

Admiral of the Fleet Sir David Beatty

Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot “Jacky” Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher

In January 1917 Admiral of the Fleet Sir David Beatty created the Grand Fleet Aircraft Committee. Its recommendation, in February, was that a warship for the espress purpose of carrying and launching land-based aircraft could not be designed and built quickly enough to deal with the immediate zeppelin problem; better to convert an existing hull to the purpose. Such ships were already under construction and available. Former First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, father of the “speed-is-armor” battlecruiser, had long dreamed of a seaborne invasion of Germany via the Baltic Sea, and ordered the construction of three large, light Courageous-class battlecruisers, HMS Courageous, Glorious and Furious, not to engage in line of battle but for the express purpose of pounding land defenses. The first two mounted standard 15-inch guns, but Furious would carry two 18-inchers, then the largest guns afloat, comparable to those of the Japanese Yamato-class battleships 20 years later. (In practice firings the guns’ blast waves sheared rivet heads off the ship’s hull.) After his battlecruisers proved fatally vulnerable at Jutland, however, Fisher had left office, and his ideas fell into disfavor. His “large light cruiser” concept endowed the Navy with three expensive hulks having no realistic purpose. The Committee’s solution, with which the Board of the Admiralty agreed and even big-gun proponent Beatty reluctantly acquiesced, was to convert Furious into an all-new type of warship: an aircraft carrier.

HMS Furious as originally designed, with single 18in turrets. Not completed in this configuration.

HMS Furious as originally designed, with single 18in turrets. Not completed in this configuration.

HMS Furious as completed in 1917, with flight deck/hangar forward, one 18in gun aft.

HMS Furious as re-commissioned on 15 March 1918, with hangar, 284 x 70 foot landing deck and crash barrier aft of funnel. Naval airship SSZ, Sea Scout Zero, operated from the aft flight deck.

HMS Furious after postwar conversion to flush-deck carrier.

HMS Furious after the 1939 addition of a starboard island, 4in guns, and increased AA weapons and radars.

Artwork courtesy of James Jackson, used by permission.

Laid down in June 1915 as one of three 20,000-ton Courageous-class “large light cruisers” intended to support a planned invasion of Germany via the Baltic, Furious mounted two 18-inch cannons—then the largest naval guns in the world and the largest ever on a Royal Navy warship, rivaled only by the 18-inchers on the Imperial Japanese Navy battleships Yamato and Musashi, 20 years later. (When test-fired, their blast sheared rivets off the hull.) Furious was still under construction, however, when Royal Navy planners foresaw that the airplane would replace the dreadnought as primary naval weapon. The forward turret was replaced by a boxy hangar with a 228-foot flight deck on the roof. Over the winter of 1917-18 her aft turret was replaced by an even larger flight deck and hangar aft, but the difficulty of putting down in the turbulence from the centerline superstructure and funnel ruled out landings there during the war.

HMS Furious as originally completed in 1917, with flight deck forward and single 18-inch gun aft

Fore quarter view of HMS Furious in 1917, with flight deck forward and single 18-inch gun aft.

HMS Furious as re-commissioned in 1918, with flight decks forward and aft and “dazzle” camouflage.

Naval airship SSZ, Sea Scout Zero, on the aft flight deck of HMS Furious, 1918. Note catwalks around midships and forward elevator.

Under command of Captain Wilmot S. Nicholson, with RNAS Squadron Commander Edwin Harris Dunning as senior flying officer, Furious joined the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in July 1917, with a compliment of three Shorts and five Sopwith Pups. Warships were already so fast, and airplanes still so slow, that their speeds overlapped comfortably. On August 2nd, as the carrier made 26 knots in Scapa Flow, Dunning approached from the side, matched velocity, and sideslipped in over the flight deck at practically a hover (a recovery technique strikingly similar to that of STOVL Sea Harrier “jump jets” off the Falklands, 65 years later), so slow relative to the ship that deck handlers could run out and actually grab the Pup by its “arresting gear”—rope loops attached to its lower wingtips—to manually haul it down. It was the first landing by an aircraft on a moving vessel. Five days later (three weeks before Smart shot down L23) the squadron commander repeated his feat, but on a second try that day his engine choked. The Pup bounced off the deck and went over the side. Dunning was knocked unconscious, and drowned.

Squadron Commander E. H. Dunning lands his Sopwith Pup on the flying-off deck of HMS Furious, Scapa Flow, 7 August 1917.

Five days later Dunning’s Pup veers off the flight deck during his second and fatal attempt to land on the carrier while underway.

Zeppelin sheds at Tondern: L-R Tobias, Toni and Toska

At Tondern the Germans weren’t having it all their own way. L7 had been shot down by the Arethusa-class light cruisers HMS Phaeton and HMS Galatea on May 4, 1916, but it was just the first of over a dozen different Zeppelins to fly out of the base. Their increasing size required upgrades to the base facilities. In January 1917 a huge third shed (if “shed” is the proper word for a steel building 730 feet long, 220 feet wide, and 130 feet high) was capable of holding two Zeppelins at once. With the two smaller sheds named “Tobias” and “Toni” (“To” for Tondern), the third was christened “Toska.”

Even before its completion, on Nov. 7, 1915, the P-class Zeppelin L18 was refueling inside the still-uncompleted shed when a leaking gas pipe caused a fire and the airship burned, leaving one man dead and seven wounded. In March 1916 the Q-class L22 struck Toska’s gate, badly damaging its nose. (On May 14 1917, L22 would be shot down near the island of Terschelling, by Flight Commander (later Air Vice Marshal) Robert Leckie in a Curtiss H-12 flying boat.) And on December 28, as the Q-class L24 was being reeled into Toska next to the P-class L17, a heavy wind caused its aft tackle to part. The airship not only broke its back on the hangar gates, it lofted up and crushed a light in the roof. The sparking short started a fire, and in moments L24 and L17 both burned inside the hangar.

Practice landings in Pups fitted with landing skids and arresting hooks went well enough on a dummy deck at the naval air station on Isle of Grain, Scotland, but proved impractical at sea. Under way, the ex-cruiser’s superstructure and funnel, still on its centerline, created such turbulence aft that the little Sopwiths were buffeted overboard, smashed on the deck or, unable to put down, struck the barrier. Out of thirteen landing attempts only three could be considered successful. Since rendering Furious into a flush-deck carrier would have taken another year or more, shipboard landings were suspended. Pilots continued to ditch at sea, and as Furious could not be risked stopping in submarine-infested waters to pick them up, that job was left to a retinue of destroyers, which lacked large enough derricks and frequently damaged the aircraft bringing them aboard. In the best case, their waterlogged fabric skins had to be replaced after each sortie. The sacrifice of an airplane per mission was reckoned no worse than the loss of a torpedo when fired; in those days torpedoes actually cost more than fighter aircraft.

The pilots soon traded in their outmoded Shorts and Pups for two-seat Sopwith 1½-Strutters, already outclassed as fighter-bombers but still viable observation planes, and a naval version of the famous Sopwith F1 Camel: the 2F1 Ships Camel, modified especially for shipboard operations. For stowage in the tight confines aboard ship the Strutters were converted with detachable wings, and the Camels with folding rear fuselages.

Sopwith F1 Camel cutaway

The Sopwith 2F1 Ships Camel was the first seagoing fighter equal to any contemporary land-based aircraft. For shipboard operations, the 2F1's upper wing featured a reduced-width center section, shortening the span by 13 inches to just under 27 feet, with upper hooks for attachment to ships' cranes for recovery from the sea. The lower wing’s dihedral was increased by over five degrees and the 18½-foot fuselage was hinged behind the cockpit, allowing the tail to be folded for stowage. The pilot’s stick was connected to the elevator cables via external control levers. Air bags in the rear fuselage served as flotation gear. The cabane struts from the cowl to the upper wing were steel tubes instead of the usual wood. The undercarriage track was made narrower, and for ditching at sea (where their drag pitched the plane sharply forward, often banging the pilot’s face on his gun butt) the wheels were reverse-mounted with their convex sides in and flat inner hubs outward; when quick-release pins were pulled via cockpit cables, the airstream across their convex sides acted to blow them off the axles and the 2F1 presented nothing but slim undercarriage struts to the water. In late 1918 Ships Camels achieved successful water landings with spring-loaded wheel ejectors and hydrovanes at the axle and tailskid, but improvements in the aircraft carrier concept soon rendered ditchings at sea unnecessary.

The 2F1 traded one of the standard Camel’s two cowl-mounted .303in Vickers machineguns for an unsynchronized .303in Lewis atop the upper wing—useful against zeppelins, which were most often pursued from below. Later mounts allowed the pilot to swivel the gun to aim upward and pull it down to reload. For airship work the guns fired a mix of explosive bullets to open the airship’s skin, and incendiary rounds to ignite the escaping hydrogen. The standard Camel bombload was four 20lb. Cooper Mark II-A or 25lb. Mark II-B bombs, but on the Tondern mission each plane instead carried two 49lb. Mark III bombs. Metal prongs projecting down from the front of the rack prevented the munitions’ nose vanes from spinning until dropped, when the airstream twisted them off to expose the impact fuzes.

Capt. Bernard Smart's 2F1, thought to be number N6755, wore a blue and white nose on the Tondern Raid.

RNAS Wing Commander turned RAF Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bell Davies

On March 15, 1918, Furious was re-commissioned at Rosyth under the flag of R. Adm. Richard F. Phillimore. That he had been named Admiral Commanding Aircraft might have indicated the Navy’s newfound emphasis on airplanes, except that two weeks later the RNAS and Royal Flying Corps were combined into the Royal Air Force. Phillimore’s flight commander, RNAS Wing Commander turned RAF Lieutenant Colonel Richard Bell Davies, had won the DSO in January 1915 for an attack on U-boat pens at Zeebrugge, in which he was badly wounded. That November he won the Victoria Cross for landing in Turkish-held Bulgaria to rescue a downed pilot. “...Squadron-Commander Davies descended at a safe distance from the burning machine, took up Sub-Lieutenant [Gilbert Formby] Smylie, in spite of the near approach of a party of the enemy,” reads his citation, “and returned to the aerodrome, a feat of airmanship that can seldom have been equalled for skill and gallantry.”

As wing commander aboard the seaplane carrier HMS Campania, Davies had seen firsthand the futility of chasing Zeppelins in the air. “The best and easiest place to catch a Zep was at her home base,” he noted. “The 1½-Strutters had originally been brought to carriers for this very purpose, but the numbers available were small and as reconnaissance aircraft they were precious. We would have to use Camels. Their range was not large but Tondern would be just within range from a point near the Danish coast.”

19-year-old Lt. Walter Albert “Toby” Yeulett was the raid's only casualty on either side. Courtesy of William Casey, tondernraid.com

The plan went all the way up the line to Beatty himself, who approved. Before the old-school battlewagon commander could change his mind, the Navy pilots planned their “Operation F.5” for late May. Two flights of Camels would make the attack. Captain William Jackson, a veteran of the deck-landing trials on Furious, would lead Captain William Dickson and Lieutenant Norman Williams in the first wave. The redoubtable Smart, now a captain, would lead Captain Thomas Thyne and Lieutenants Samuel Dawson and Walter Yeulett in the second. Switching the standard Camel load of four 20-pound Cooper Mark II-A bombs for a pair of special Mark III 49-pounders, they practiced attacks on shed-sized targets marked out on their Scottish air base and dropped live rounds in the Firth of Forth to acquaint themselves with the effects. Davies reluctantly cut 19-year-old Yeulett when he could not master the technique.

Steaming out at the end of May, Furious almost immediately encountered a U-boat contact—possibly the first brush between the two supreme warship types of the future—and retreated to port. On June 18th, she joined the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron, steaming up and down the North Sea as zeppelin bait. Only a pair of German floatplanes ventured out against this strange new British warship. Furious shot back—the only occasion during the war in which it fired in anger—and launched several Camels, one of which forced a seaplane down onto the water.

”Furious Camels” by James Field

On June 27, this time screened by the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron and the 13th Destroyer Flotilla, Furious put out on Operation F.6. From midnight on the 28th a storm built, lashing the ship with 25-knot winds and 12-foot waves by dawn on the 29th. Just taking the Camels out of their hangar risked having them blown off the deck. The fleet returned to Scotland with the Germans none the wiser.

“It was about a week before we were able to try again,” Davies wrote. “In the meantime practice continued, Youlet [sic] improved rapidly and I agreed to put him back in the team.” Operation F.7 commenced at 1203 hours on July 17, with Furious accompanied by five battleships of the 1st Battle Squadron and five cruisers of the 7th Light Cruiser Squadron, plus a destroyer escort—the world’s first carrier task force. At midnight, leaving the dreadnoughts behind, Furious steamed as close as possible to the Danish coast, but before the Camels could be launched another storm blew up. Rather than retreat yet again to port, the carrier and cruisers delayed 24 hours, sailing back and forth under the cover of the battleships, out of sight of land. At nightfall, under threatening skies, Furious again steamed landward for a final attempt.

“Fast and Furious” by Stan Stokes

2F1 Ships Camels arrayed on the forward flight deck of HMS Furious en route to Tondern. Rondel insignia appear to have been masked with paint, but also visible are several distinctive individual paint schemes. Even the retaining fence complies with the ship’s dazzle camouflage.

Captain Horst Treusch von Buttlar-Bradenfels' night-camouflaged U-class Zeppelin L54 noses into Tondern's double shed, Toska.

At Tondern, “The evening was fine and clear,” Buttlar recalled. “From the windows of my flat I could see the aerodrome, which was about half a mile away.” The smaller sheds were obsolete—Tobias held only a dirigible balloon and Toni was being dismantled—but the double shed, Toska, housed two zeppelins, Buttlar’s L53 and the even newer L60 with almost two million cubic feet of hydrogen each, not to mention several tons of bombs waiting to be loaded.

The U-class Zeppelin L54 (factory number LZ 99) was of the late-war “height climber” classes designed to elude new high-performance Allied fighters by reaching previously unattainable altitudes. Although operating above enemy warplanes and antiaircraft fire (so high their engines could not be heard from the ground and they attacked by surprise), the height climbers encountered problems with navigation above cloud layers and the unexpected effects of oxygen deprivation and subzero temperatures on human and mechanical performance. Inability to forecast wind conditions above 15,000 feet also led to high-velocity jet streams threatening the airships’ light construction. L60 (LZ 108) was of the even newer V-class, of similar dimensions and performance, but with 14 gas cells (vs. 18 in L54), deleted tailskid and other modifications for simpler design and weight savings. Sopwith 2F1 Camel, length 18½ feet, shown to scale.

Out in the North Sea, Furious braved deteriorating weather. “With the wind as it was,” Davies reckoned, “it seemed doubtful the Camels could get back to the ship after the attack. However, they would certainly have enough petrol to cross the Danish frontier.” Facing the loss of his precious few carrier-trained pilots to drowning or internment, Davies nevertheless gave the go-ahead. On the morning of July 19, at 0315 local time, about 80 miles northwest of Tondern, Furious launched seven Camels, in two waves, on their historic raid.

Almost immediately they encountered trouble. Thyne’s plane suffered engine problems, and he was forced to turn back and ditch. The rest sighted the Danish coast and followed it south, turning inland off Tondern. Jackson, in the lead, sighted the target at approximately 0435.

Lt. William Forster Dickson, who dropped his first bomb on the Tondern market square, in WWII became Air Vice Marshal commanding the Desert Air Force, and eventually Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

“While I was still half asleep I seemed to hear the whir and whiz of a propeller. It was not the note of a Zeppelin at all!” remembered Buttlar. “I jumped up and rushed to the window, from which I could get a view of the whole aerodrome. Suddenly a shadow passed over our house, a few yards above the roof, absurdly low. A British aeroplane!”

That may have been Dickson, whose first bomb, released from 700 feet, inadvertently landed in Tondern’s market square. Jackson, though, went straight for the immense double shed. At least three 50-pounders pierced its roof. Inside, almost 4 million cubic feet of hydrogen awaited only a spark to ignite.

The Tondern Raid as depicted by Dugald Cameron

“My heart was in my mouth,” said Buttlar, who peddled a bicycle toward the fray. He saw Toska’s windows light up from inside and fire gush through the holes in its roof. Luckily for the Germans, in preparation for the day’s operations, the huge shed doors were open; the funeral pyres of the dying zeppelins were able to escape rather than building up inside. “In a terrible straight column, lit up with flames, the smoke rose skyward from the shed,” the captain continued. “Gruesomely beautiful it was, this giant flame of sacrifice in which our L54 and L60 perished. I was cycling like mad toward the aerodrome when suddenly a terrible thought flashed through my mind. The heavy bombs were still in the shed!” A detachment braved the flames inside Toska to roll the stored bombs—some already dangerously hot—outside.

Either by design or poor navigation, Smart’s flight arrived 10 minutes after Jackson’s, and not from seaward but from the east, inland. They found the Tondern defenses now wide awake. “Three A.A. batteries close together attracted my attention,” reported Smart. “When in position I gave the signal and dived on the remaining large shed [Tobias], releasing my bombs at 800 to 1,000 feet. The first fell short, but the second hit the centre of the shed, sending up a quantity of smoke or dust.” The dirigible inside Tobias flamed up. Another bomb struck a wagon loaded with hydrogen cylinders, but failed to explode.

“In the centre of the aerodrome, in front of their hutments, the seamen were standing with nothing on but their undergarments, or half naked, and firing with their rifles as hard as they could,” recounted Buttlar. “They might just as well not have been there. The Englishmen continued circling round without climbing an inch higher.”

The Tondern Raid as depicted by Simon Smith, from Osprey Publishing’s “Sopwith Camel”

Sopwith Camel by John Young (1930–2015). Royal Air Force Museum

Quite the contrary, according to Smart: “The whole surroundings were thick with mechanics or soldiers armed with rifles and machine-guns, which gave so disconcerting a fire that I dived with full engine to 50 feet and skimmed over the ground in a zig-zag course to avoid it, and by the time I got clear I was unable to see the sheds on account of the thick screen of smoke from the first shed.” Jackson, Dickson and Williams were long gone. Smart followed. “The clouds were now very low and a general haze made visibility bad,” he reported. “I slowed down to wait for the others, but after doing a circuit at slow speed and with still nothing in sight, I decided it was inadvisable to wait longer as I had already been in the air nearly two hours and the wind had increased.

Out at sea the fleet anxiously waited for the Ships Camels to return. “At last [they] hove in sight,” Davies later recalled, “and landed in fairly rapid succession near the destroyers.

But only two. Dickson put down at 0555 and was picked up. Smart spent 15 minutes on the tail of his bobbing, half-sunken plane, losing his lifebelt, swallowing a good bit of seawater and feeling “done in by the time the boat arrived—three able bodied seamen clutched hold of me and hauled me aboard like a sack of flour.”

No other Camels returned. Williams, Jackson and Dawson decided they didn’t have the gas. They landed in Denmark and were interned, but not closely watched. All three soon escaped to Britain. Yeulett evidently misjudged his fuel status. Days later his remains and Camel washed up on a Danish beach. He was the only fatality in the attack on either side. “After hanging about off the coast until quite sure that the rest must have come down somewhere (we hoped in Denmark),” reported Davies, “we shaped course for the Forth.”

Mission accomplished. “I stood facing the burnt-out wreck of my ship,” Buttlar recalled of the collapsed duralumin skeletons inside Toska. “I had watched many ships perish, but this was the first time I saw my own destroyed.” He could count himself lucky. Most dying zeppelins’ crews burned with them, but at Tondern only four men were wounded.

The double zeppelin shed, Toska, gushing the smoke of burning zeppelins

The remains of Zeppelin L54

The remains of Zeppelin L60

“The attack had been carried out extremely smartly, and had been an entire success,” Buttlar admitted. “Two airships had been completely destroyed, and the airship base had been rendered harmless for some considerable time.” In fact, Tondern was thereafter only used as an emergency landing field. After the armistice the border changed; instead of one of the northernmost towns in Germany, Tondern became Tønder, one of the southernmost towns in Denmark.

HMS Furious circa 1935-36, with a flight of Blackburn “Baffin” torpedo planes overhead.

HMS Furious circa 1939, as she appeared fighting in World War II

The secret of the aircraft carrier was out. Though Furious launched no more raids during the Great War, afterward it was rebuilt as a full-length flattop, the only aircraft carrier to serve in both world wars. By then carriers had replaced battleships as the supreme weapon at sea, today rivaled only by the ballistic missile submarine. A Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier comprises nine squadrons of fighter-bombers, helicopters and support planes, over 60 aircraft all told, more than in the inventory of many nations. Each carrier is a mobile air force, the ultimate combination of warship and warplane—one of the world’s oldest weapons, and the newest.

Supercarrier USS Nimitz

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