HMS Glorious was a warship of the Royal Navy. Built as a "large light cruiser" during World War I, Glorious, her sister HMS Courageous, and half-sister HMS Furious were the brainchildren of Admiral Lord Fisher, and were designed to be "light cruiser destroyers". They were originally intended to be heavy support for shallow water operations in the Baltic Sea, which use ultimately never came to pass. She saw action in World War I, and then was converted into an aircraft carrier. While evacuating British troops from Norway in 1940, she was sunk with the loss of over 1,200 lives.

In the night of 7/8 June, the Glorious, under the command of Captain Guy D'Oyly-Hughes (who was a submarine specialist and had only ten months experience in aircraft carrier operations), took on board ten Gloster Gladiators and eight Hawker Hurricanes from No. 46 Squadron RAF and No. 263 Squadron Royal Air Force, the first landing of modern aircraft without arrestor hooks on a carrier. These had been flown off from land bases to keep them from being destroyed in the evacuation after the pilots discovered that a 14lb sandbag carried in the rear of the aircraft allowed full brakes to be applied immediately on landing.

Glorious was part of a troop convoy headed for Scapa Flow, also including the carrier Ark Royal, but in the early hours of 8 June Glorious requested and was granted permission to proceed independently, and at a faster speed. It is believed this was because D'Oyly-Hughes was impatient to hold a court-martial of his Commander (Air), J. B. Heath, who had refused an order to carry out an attack on shore targets on the grounds that the targets were at best ill-defined and his aircraft were unsuited to the task, and had therefore been left behind in Scapa to await trial.^[1] While sailing through the Norwegian Sea, the carrier and her two escorts, the destroyers HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent, were intercepted by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau armed with 11-inch guns. The carrier and her escorts were sunk in two hours, roughly 280 nautical miles (510 km) west of Harstad.

The Scharnhorst was badly damaged by a torpedo from Acasta, and both German vessels took a number of 4.7-inch shell hits. The damage to the German ships was sufficient to cause the Germans to retire to Trondheim, which allowed the safe passage of the evacuation convoy through the area later that day. Bletchley Park had received information and reports that wireless traffic analyses indicated that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were out, but these were disregarded as insufficiently credible.

The loss of Glorious, Ardent and Acasta went unnoticed and although an estimated 900 men abandoned Glorious, those that reached rafts drifted for three days with the eventual loss of 1,519 men in total; there were only 45 survivors. The single survivor from Acasta was rescued by the Norwegian steam merchant ship Borgund which also saved 38 men from one of Glorious' lifeboats. All 39 men saved by Borgund were set ashore at Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands on 14 June.^[2] According to Winton a further four survivors were rescued by the Norwegian ship Svalbard II which was also bound for the Faeroe Islands but was sighted by the enemy and forced to return to Norway where the four became prisoners of war.

Lee (page 20) comments that four German radio broadcasts announcing the sinking were intercepted but were not acted on, as the Admiralty duty officer was not aware of the naval movements from Norway because communications between the operational and intelligence sections were haphazard. Winton also states that the whole evacuation from Norway was carried out under extreme secrecy. The Glorious did not have time to send a radio message.

In 1997, Channel 4 (UK) screened a documentary in its Secret History series entitled "The Tragedy of HMS Glorious" and showed interviews with a surviving RAF pilot and personnel from the Royal Navy and the German Navy. Witnesses from Glorious and the cruiser Devonshire stated that an enemy sighting report of "2PB" (two pocket battleships) had been transmitted by radio from Glorious and received correctly in Devonshire but that the latter ship, under the command of Vice Admiral John H.D. Cunningham, continued on her course and maintained radio silence for essential operational reasons (she was evacuating the Norwegian Royal Family at the time). More technical details are given by Howland (below). Allegations were also made by British and German witnesses that Glorious had insufficient speed immediately available and that her reconnaissance aircraft were not in use, allowing her to be discovered and overtaken by the enemy ships, which achieved hits with their third 11-inch (279.4 mm) salvo at a range of 26,500 yards (24 kilometres (13 nmi)).