GHOSTS OF THE GLORIOUS
At just a few minutes past 6:30 p.m. on January 28, 1999, Alan Beith, a member of Parliament representing the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the north of England, rose to address his colleagues to begin what is known as an adjournment debate. Members of Parliament may set any issue as the topic of such a debate, and an appropriate government official is required to attend, listen, and respond. In this case, John Spellar, Britain’s undersecretary of state for defense, was on hand.
It was a clear, unseasonably warm evening in London, the sidewalks crowded with Tube-bound commuters. The front page of the Evening Standard announced Ford Motor Company’s purchase of Volvo and displayed the smiling face of Julia Roberts, the actress. But inside Parliament, as Beith spoke, this routine Thursday in the last year of the 20th century faded away, and a terrible moment from 59 years earlier came into focus. The existential worries of wartime replaced the incidental concerns of peacetime, busy London dissolved into a frigid Norwegian Sea, and one of the great and inexplicable disasters of Britain’s desperate fight against Germany took center stage.
On that fateful day in 1940, he asked, why was HMS Glorious sent home on its own?
“On the afternoon of 8 June 1940, two German battle cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, sighted a wisp of smoke on the arctic horizon,” Beith began. “Two hours later, the carrier HMS Glorious and its two escorting destroyers, Ardent and Acasta, had been sunk.” Beith went on to describe how more than 1,500 lives had been lost, qualifying the incident as one of England’s worst naval disasters of World War II.
The Glorious and its escorts had been caught while returning to Scapa Flow in Scotland following England’s failed bid to save Norway in the early days of the war. In the rock-paper-scissors game of that era’s naval warfare, aircraft carriers reigned supreme—until they came under the guns of an enemy battleship, in which case they were utterly helpless.
So it was for HMS Glorious.
“Why was Glorious returning home independently of the main convoy?” Beith asked. Several of his constituents, he said, were pushing him to get answers. “Why was she so badly prepared? Why was her air power not used even for reconnaissance? Was there not sufficient intelligence about German activity in the region to suggest that Glorious should have been in a much greater state of readiness?”
History—and especially the history of World War II—shapes day-to-day life in Britain more than it does, for example, in the United States. But the intense emotions stirred up by the sinking of the Glorious are unusual, as is the fact that more than 50 years afterward, the incident merited heated debate in the heart of the nation’s government. Many of Beith’s questions went unanswered in 1999 and remain unanswered today.
The story of the sinking of the is shot through with drama and subplots. The ship had been the setting for the
