Original subtitles

Warships are the ultimate symbol

of a nation's military might.

These things are monstrous wonders of technology.

Enormous vessels, crewed by thousands,

bristling with massive guns and powerful aircraft.

They can deliver terrifying destruction

and turn the tide of history.

The ship were built to win the war.

There was no other reason.

From the beginning of the 20th century

to the present day, these are the stories

of classic warships.

From Dreadnoughts to Bismarck,

to Japan's monster sea warrior Yamato,

the American super ships Wisconsin, Lexington

and Enterprise, to today's cutting edge Royal Navy carriers.

These are the world's greatest warships.

September 11th, 2001.

The aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise,

is in the Arabian Gulf on her way home.

Without warning, she is ordered to turn around

and head to the coastal waters of southwest Asia.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have shocked the world

and prompted the American government

to declare their war on terror.

As part of that war, Enterprise's aircraft will fly hundreds

of missions against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the remote

and distant mountains of Afghanistan.

This is just the latest chapter in the story of Enterprise,

a story that already stretches back some 40 years.

But the story of the aircraft carrier goes back

a lot further than that.

So how did the aircraft carrier grow from humble beginnings

to become the decisive weapon in the Second World War,

the ultimate instrument of military

and political strategy in the Cold War,

and as we enter a new era, promise to rule the waves

for decades to come?

They are still today arguably the most complex,

expensive pieces of design and engineering on the planet.

Within a decade of the first manned flight

in the earliest years of the 20th century,

naval strategists were thinking about launching aircraft

at sea, but direct military engagement

was not their primary concern.

Dave Morris is a historian of naval aviation.

The whole reason in many ways for the Navy to become

involved with aviation and aircraft

and taking aircraft onto their ships is effectively

extending the view over the horizon,

and so reconnaissance is really where the whole

of naval aviation begins.

When the first World War broke out in 1914,

the need to find ways to fully combine

air and sea power intensified.

So at the start of the First World War,

it's in its infancy.

Aircraft are incredibly basic.

There is no means of actually launching an aircraft

from the deck of a ship.

Basic catapults, basic arrester systems,

platforms on the fronts of ships.

All of it was ad hoc experiments, almost flying by the seat

of your pants, trying out something new

for the very first time.

It was Britain's Royal Navy

that led this experimentation, and the reserve collection

of the Fleet Air arm in Somerset houses one of the few

remaining examples of an early attempt

at launching aircraft at sea, the Seaplane Lighter.

A seaplane Lighter is a towed vessel.

It doesn't have an engine, it's not a powered craft.

It's a towed vessel capable of transporting,

in this case, an aircraft.

This craft could be towed and extend the range of a seaplane

before it could be launched to fly.

Crucially, as the name suggests,

the Seaplane Lighter was only launching seaplanes,

not fighter aircraft.

But in the early years of World War I,

Britain desperately needed fighter aircraft at sea.

Since 1915, dozens have been killed in raids on towns

and cities along England's East Coast.

The raids were carried out by German zeppelins,

huge airships carrying up to two tons of bombs.

An aircraft launched from land offered little defense.

It would take a sub with camel, typically 45

to 50 minutes to spiral up to the 16, 17,000 feet

that the Zeppelin would be operating at

and maybe only have five minutes at most on target

before it would then have to return to its base,

possibly gliding because it was out of fuel.

Salvation lay in the Seaplane Lighter,

but not before some serious trial and error.

What if we put a wooden deck on top of this craft?

What if we towed the whole contraption at 15 to 20 knots

into a 15 to 20 knot sea breeze, get an equivalent

cross deck wind speed of around 40 knots.

Could they launch a Camel from a towed Lighter

and then take a fighter plane to sea?

Landing was a totally different problem to solve altogether.

It could not land back onto the Lighter.

It was not safe enough and long enough in deck space

to land.

It would have to do a controlled crash into the sea

alongside the Lighter, and hopefully the pilot

would get rescued.

As pilots and sailors began to master

the new technology, the Seaplane Lighter came into its own.

Only nine days after the first successful experiment

to see a sop with Camel take off

from a Seaplane Lighter towed at sea, took the whole

contraption into the center of the North Sea,

waited on station and then intercepted Zeppelin L53

and successfully shot it down, shocking the German

Zeppelin crews into realizing they could be intercepted

by fighter planes far out to sea.

The aircraft had proven it could be a viable

sea-based weapon, and the British were keen

to scale up the technology.

How could they develop that into a full size craft?

How could they effectively take multiple aircraft

wherever they needed to go around the world

to deliver their aircraft, almost like taking their airfield

wherever they needed it.

And this was the key final piece of the puzzle.

Launched in 1918, HMS Argus

was a reconditioned commercial ship

with a runway built on top of her hull.

And she was a real game changer.

HMS Argus was the world's first aircraft carrier.

By that I mean a ship that was capable of both launching

aircraft from its flight deck

and recovering them onto the same deck with a hanger under

that deck in which they could be stored, fueled, armed,

and sustained in operations for a considerable period.

You have a lifting system to get aircraft

up and down from a big hangar deck below, and you have

an arresting system to stop the aircraft

as they land on the deck.

Argus could now take 20 aircraft

anywhere it wanted anywhere in the world.

By the end of the war, the German fleet was spending

nearly all its time in Schillig Roads, its main base.

And the admiralty came up with the idea

of using aircraft from Argus to attack them in their harbor.

They'd practiced operating from Argus.

They were ready to go in early November, 1918,

but the armistice happened

before they could carry out the attack.

Argus may not have played a leading role

in World War I, but the blueprint for the aircraft carrier

we know today had been drawn.

And in the next war, carriers will be at the heart

of the action.

As the world slid towards war in the 1930s,

Naval engineers were restricted

by treaty in the size of battleship they could build.

Allowances for aircraft carriers were far more generous.

So there's a strong incentive to develop

and build aircraft carriers.

And what you see is half-built hulls of capital ships.

Mostly cruisers are converted on the stocks

into aircraft carriers.

The next step was to move beyond

just sticking a runway on top of an existing ship.

HMS Ark Royal, completed in 1938,

incorporated all the admiralty ideas on how aircraft

should be operated at sea from the 20s and 30s.

She was big, she was 800 feet long.

She had stowage in her two hangers, one over the other

for 60 or slightly more aircraft.

Ark Royal is a pioneering warship for the British

because she's the first full-size fleet carrier

that they really built from the keel up.

So she's a world beater for the European Theater

when she comes in.

Ark Royal's flight deck was nearly

250 meters long and sat a full 20 meters above the waves.

Her command and control functions were housed in an island

on the starboard side of the deck,

the common feature of aircraft carriers to this day.

But it was the interior of the Ark Royal

which was truly revolutionary.

Andrew Chung is curator of ship's plans

at the National Maritime Museum.

This is the general arrangement drawing

for the aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal,

showing her as completed.

Now, it's an indicator of just how complicated

this ship was.

One of the secrets to Ark Royal's very impressive aircraft

capacity was this new enclosed double story hangar

that her designers built into her.

In terms of the height of the average person,

that's effectively a four story hangar divided into two.

It was the first time that a proper weatherproofed hangar

of that size had been built into a British aircraft carrier.

And unlike previous large carriers in the Royal Navy,

this one was designed to optimize aircraft handling.

So the lower hanger was given over entirely

to aircraft maintenance,

whereas the upper hanger was intended purely for re-arming,

refueling, and preparing planes for their next mission.

So the admiralty believed that with this arrangement,

they could come to a very efficient turnaround in aircraft

and avoid a situation

that they'd experienced in older carriers

where ground crew doing one thing

with one aircraft would get in the way

of ground crew doing something entirely different

with another aircraft.

The Ark royal also included catapults

to help launch planes from her decks

and arrester the cables to slow them down

when they returned.

And she was about to be put to the test

against the most fearsome battleship on the seas,

the jewel in Hitler's naval crown, the mighty Bismarck.

A quarter of a long and crewed by over 2000 men,

Bismarck boasted fearsome and firepower and speed.

She terrorized Britain's vital Atlantic convoys.

Something needed to be done.

The hunting of the Bismarck far out to sea

demonstrates, again, just the importance of the Navy

being able to take aircraft to sea.

The Atlantic is absolutely vast so trying to cover it all

by sea is finding a needle in a haystack.

It's still very difficult doing it from aircraft,

but you suddenly start to increase the chances

of finding your target.

Bismarck had already sunk HMS Hood,

the biggest battleship in the British fleet when she was

spotted on the 26th of May, 1941.

Swordfish biplanes were launched from Ark Royal in pursuit.

The trustee Swordfish was able to drop down

to almost sea height, level out and approach

60 feet above the waves and launch their torpedoes

against the Bismarck.

The damage they did to Bismarck was fatal.

One of the torpedoes hit the rudder

right after and jammed it.

So no matter what they tried to do with her engines,

Bismarck could only turn in circles.

The ship was intact apart from her ability to head home.

And so she could do nothing but wait for the big guns

of the home fleet to come up at dawn on the next day.

Although Bismarck was ultimately sunk

by battleships, it was air power that had crippled her.

Dr. Jann Witt is an expert in German naval strategy

in the Second World War.

To a certain extent,

you could call the Bismarck the essence of a battleship,

but at the same time, she was a dinosaur.

She was the best, almost the best you could achieve

in battleship building, but in strategic

and also in tactical terms, she was outdated

because she falls victim to a new weapon.

Ark Royal may well have changed the rules

of engagement on the high seas,

but the British aircraft carrier

as an all round package remained a work in progress

and challenges remained.

Principally, how to build planes best suited

to this complex form of aviation.

It is probably, I would say the most challenging

form of flying.

So if you imagine just the three biggest challenges

of trying to land on and take off from an aircraft carrier,

the first thing is your runway is absolutely tiny.

Secondly, your runway is moving up and down.

So when you're trying to take off,

you're moving up and down.

When you're landing, it's moving up and down.

So your aircraft have to be incredibly robust

because when you land, you're gonna slam down on that deck.

And the third point is that your runway moves.

So when you take off and go on your mission

and you come back, your runway isn't gonna be

where you left it.

So all of those things make naval flying

incredibly difficult.

At the beginning of World War II,

the Royal Navy is still using, in many ways,

quite outdated aircraft, Gladiator biplanes,

Swordfish, typical of the aircraft

that would be on the Ark Royal, Skewer dive bombers,

but still quite slow.

The necessity for a fighter aircraft purpose built

was very, very high.

The solution to all these problems

was a very British compromise.

Let's take an already successful plane

and adapt it for life on the ocean wave.

What we have here is the Super Marine Seafire.

The modified naval version of the Spitfire aircraft

converted to go on ship decks with folding wings.

It can enable 'em to go into the hangar spaces below,

that had takeoff catapult spools fitted

to strengthen parts of the fuselage.

It had a deck hook, a rester hook fitted to the tail

of the aircraft, but there's still compromises.

The pilot is still sat very low.

The pilot is still sat quite a long way

rearwards behind the engine,

which gives bad visibility on approach

to the ships for landing.

The undercarriage is still woefully weak for an aircraft

that has to punch down onto an aircraft carrier deck

in all winds and weathers.

So when it's flying, the Spitfire/Seafire,

it was still a very, very capable fighter,

but it still had many, many shortcomings

as a deck landing aircraft.

The Americans made no such compromises

with the planes they would place on their carriers.

In America, there was no Air Force

and fighters and strike aircraft were designed for the Navy,

by the Navy for naval use exclusively.

This strategy will be brought to life

in purpose-built carrier aircraft

such as the Hellcat and the Corsair.

This was the best that money could buy at the time.

This was taking a design from the drawing board

and creating a carrier born aircraft with all of the things

that that would benefit from and require,

a very strong undercarriage, very strong wing,

powerful engine, deck hook designed from the outset

to be in the best position on the aircraft,

landing on carrier decks in all winds and weathers,

taking the rigors of thumping onto the decks

and being pulled to a halt by the arrester wires,

higher, better visual position for the pilot.

The impact of these purpose-built

American planes was not lost on the British Navy

high command, who saw a solution to their problem.

From 1941, the Americans came up with

what was called the Lend-Lease Act,

where they lent us the aircraft for the duration of the war.

And in the end, thousands of aircraft

came to the Royal Navy in that way.

This was an enormous step forward for aircraft

for the Royal Navy at that time in the war.

But it wasn't only the Royal Navy

who were keen on maximizing the military potential

of naval aviation.

In late 1941, six Japanese carriers traveled

three and a half thousand miles across the Pacific.

In total, they launched 353 planes against the battleships

of the US Pacific fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Four battleships were sunk.

Four more were heavily damaged.

Nearly two and a half thousand Americans died.

Pearl Harbor showed for the first time

that carriers had a strategic role as a striking force

that could travel considerable distances, attack targets,

and cause a lot of damage when they got there.

But whilst Pearl Harbor was a stunning triumph

for the Japanese, it would have unforeseen repercussions.

Not only had the US Navy's own aircraft carriers escaped

the attack, but America's response would herald the arrival

of arguably the greatest carriers in history.

After Pearl Harbor, there was no doubt

that the capital ship of the Second World War

was gonna be the aircraft carrier

and was no longer the battleship.

The centerpiece here was the Essex class carrier.

These were very large ships,

38 to 39,000 tons full load displacement.

They had capabilities to receive a lot of punishment.

They were very survivable because of that

and also because of their large anti-aircraft battery.

But most of all, they could carry a very large air group.

In total, an astonishing 24 ships of this class

were built.

Each ship could carry up to 110 aircraft

housed in 3,600 square meters of hangar space

and were crewed by more than two and a half thousand men.

They had a range of 28 and a half thousand kilometers,

equivalent of traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo

three times.

With a top speed of 33 knots, the Essex class carriers

dominated the world's biggest ever battlefield,

the Pacific Ocean.

The Essex class aircraft carriers can fairly claim

to be the finest aircraft carriers produced by any nation.

They captured that balance

of aircraft capacity, protection,

both passive, and active and high speed

better than any other carrier design that was produced,

and as significantly, the United States

was able to produce them in numbers.

The Essex class carrier program

was one of the biggest industrial achievements of the war.

11 of them had been ordered by 1940,

and in the end there were 24 of them completed

before the war had ended.

When you think of that in terms of shipbuilding, it's huge.

The ship were built to win the war.

There was no other reason.

In 1941, Japanese airplanes had launched

a devastating attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The US Navy was reeling from the attack,

but it was about to take delivery

of the most iconic aircraft carriers in history,

the Essex class.

The USS Lexington was one of the first Essex class carriers

launched in 1943.

Kenneth Kohlstedt was a gunner on board

during his first deployments in the Pacific.

They wanted to have two squadrons of aircraft on the ship

rather than one for each division.

That is fighter, dive bomber and torpedo bomber.

It's a very flexible type of strike force that you have.

You can be going out after ships

where you'd be using your torpedo bombers

and they typically would do a simultaneous attack

where the torpedo bombers would come in from low altitude

and the dive bombers would come in from high altitude.

Thus, they're splitting the defensive guns of the enemy.

He's gotta handle both at the same time.

This variety of aerial firepower was critical

in overwhelming the Japanese fleet.

And it gave Lexington and her fellow Essex class carriers

the starring role in the US advance towards Japan.

In 1943, the Americans began an island hopping campaign

in Pacific on their way to Tokyo.

And the centerpiece of this campaign

was the Fast Carrier Task Force.

The task force had aircraft carriers

at its core.

These will be surrounded by battleships and destroyers

to keep the enemy at arm's length,

allowing the carriers to launch aerial attacks.

Lexington led Task Force 58.

Its first major engagement was at Truk Lagoon,

a Japanese carrier base in the Central Pacific.

The Japanese get their first taste of what the Essex class

carriers can do when they raid Truk Lagoon

in February, 1944, in the very aptly named

Operation Hailstone.

This Japanese bastion is effectively destroyed

as a frontline base over the course of a series of raids.

Most of its aircraft are destroyed

either in the air or on the ground.

Any shipping are lucky enough to be caught in the lagoon

is sunk and the Japanese never use Truk again.

They can't.

They've had notice served to them that their premier

Central Pacific bastion is no longer an option.

The Americans called it the big blue blanket,

which was the air cover they gave

to the amphibious operations that captured the islands

that moved west across the Pacific

to the very shores of Japan.

They could stay at sea for weeks, even months on end

because they had logistics support groups with oil tankers,

ammunition, stick ships, stores ships.

They could even provide replacement aircraft and pilots.

It's one of the most powerful expressions

of naval power in the pre-nuclear era.

Four months after flattening Truk Lagoon,

Lexington joined 14 other US carriers in the Philippine Sea

for what will become the decisive engagement

of the war in the Pacific.

This was the largest aircraft carrier battle

of the Pacific War.

We brought 15 aircraft carriers

to the battle and the Japanese brought nine,

and there's no other battle that had that many

aircraft carriers in it.

They hurl this force at the new US carrier fleet

in the hope that they can turn the tables on the US Navy.

And it's a complete disaster.

The US remembers it as the great Mariana's Turkey shoot

where dozens of Japanese planes are lost

for each American pilot shot down.

The battle effectively ends the Japanese

carrier fleet for good.

And it means that in the later battles,

the Americans confidently come up with this huge

aerial superiority which the Japanese simply cannot match.

Since victory at Pearl Harbor in 1941,

Japan's Navy had been outmaneuvered and out-fought

by the US Navy.

The war was slipping away.

The Japanese employed a final desperate tactic

to knock out US carriers, the Kamikaze attack.

Planes packed with explosives and carrying only enough fuel

for their outward journey would be flown directly into enemy

targets in suicide attacks designed to cause maximum damage.

Lexington's defense was her Bofors anti-aircraft guns.

Let's take out downtown.

This is the largest machine gun produced in the world.

It was made in Sweden, utilized

by almost every country in the world.

And it fires 120 rounds a minute.

And what's unique about the gun is you had a trainer

who sat on this side and a pointer over there

who actually fired the gun.

As the gun is training, each operator, the pointer

and the trainer would have to coordinate

to bring the gun in the position.

As he's coming around, it was the pointer's responsibility,

the man on the left side of the gun, to actually fire it.

When he was in position, he would push his treadle

with his left foot and the gun would fire.

Once the kamikaze threat was acknowledged

and everyone knew that these people were out to kill him,

the gunner had to stay on their toes.

Not only were they defending the ship,

but they were defending their home.

To this day, a Japanese flag marks the spot

where a kamikaze pilot crashed into the Lexington,

having avoided the hail of bullets from the Bofors

machine guns.

Kenneth Kohlstedt was on board that day.

The Lexington was off the Philippines, but two kamikazes

dropped out on the clouds, going from left to right

across the bow of the ship.

Our radars had picked up the contacts

as they were coming in, but our defensive patrol

was unable to find them.

They probably saw the ship at the same time

the ship saw them.

And the ship started turning right

to keep the guns focused on them.

We got the first one, but the second one kept boring on in,

and he was coming down from about 5,000 feet.

He got hit several times, but he just kept coming in.

The gasoline on the aircraft spilled over the crew,

which were out in the open

and incinerated all of them, which was really horrible.

As a result, we lost 48 people

and 132 were wounded.

The pilot had obviously intended to hit the flight deck

and make a large hole on the flight deck,

which would've put Lexington out of service,

but he hit this area instead.

So in spite of the horror of the deaths and the wounded

that happened, he did not seriously damage the ship.

This pilot who was flying the aircraft

that crashed into the Lexington was probably

one of the original kamikaze pilots that had been selected.

Amazingly, the whole incident was captured

in a series of extraordinary photographs.

This photo album was made by a sailor on board this ship

in 1944.

He was photographer on board

and his name was Daniel John Connolly.

He took all the original photos

of the kamikaze strike on five November, 1944.

And during the attack,

he was standing approximately right here,

and he received a bronze star for photographing the aircraft

coming straight in at him.

And there was at some point that he said,

"Well, I gotta get outta here."

Not even a direct hit from a Kamikaze pilot

could slow down the mighty Lexington.

By the end of the war, Lexington had shot down

372 enemy aircraft and destroyed a further 475

on the ground.

She had sunk over 300,000 tons of shipping,

and not one Essex class carrier was sunk during the war.

Well, without the Essex class carriers,

it's difficult to say what alternate history would've been,

but we definitely would not have had the striking power

that we had during the Second World War.

When the second World War finally ended

in 1945, the victorious allies would redraw

the map of Europe, and in turn, usher in the Cold War.

The Cold War was played out not against one opponent,

although obviously the Soviet Union was behind everything

that was going on in the communist world.

But sometimes you had to fight their surrogates.

North Korea, North Vietnam, and other countries.

Carriers were invaluable in that they could provide power,

a pulse of power bigger than most air forces,

in order to cover the big blue blanket again, if you like,

wherever Western foreign policy dictated.

And the aircraft carrier that was built

to meet this new challenge with something special.

This is the big E, The Enterprise,

the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier,

the largest ship in the world.

Enterprise was a giant in every sense.

She was longer than four jumbo jets laid end to end.

Her four and a half acres of deck space was the equivalent

of three football pitches.

She could accommodate 90 aircraft

and house a crew of nearly 6,000.

Enterprise was powered by eight nuclear reactors,

which gave her an unlimited range.

In her 51 year service, Enterprise covered nearly

2 million kilometers, projecting US power

to every corner of the globe.

The USS Enterprise impresses me from her sheer scale.

At the time she was completed in 1961,

the US Navy pointed out that she's the largest mobile object

ever built by man.

Dave Zilber was a damage control officer

on board Enterprise.

He remembers well long stretches at sea.

Because it was nuclear powered,

there was nothing to stop it from continuing underway.

It was just getting food in stores for the crew, you know,

so even if you loaded it all out just for the crew,

you could just keep going for years and years

as long as you could keep bringing on more stores.

You knew that something special was happening

when they'd throw out steaks and lobster tail,

not always a good announcement was coming.

It's like, "Okay guys, now we're gonna stay out underway

for another two weeks.

We're not getting that port visit,

but we're gonna give you steak and lobster for dinner."

With a ship's company of nearly 6,000,

the Enterprise was not so much a warship

as a small city at sea.

Like any city, keeping it going was a complex

logistical operation.

There was the Public works department,

there was an electrical officer, auxiliaries officer,

and we all worked for the chief engineer,

and we all had divisions of people underneath us

with a lot of experience.

We had Warren officers, we had Chief Petty officers

that ran the enlisted troops

of various different backgrounds and experiences.

More than any of the ship before her,

Enterprise had perfected the art of sea power.

Its huge size and immense crew meant it could launch

multiple deadly air strikes against targets

all over the world.

Once each aircraft came down and was caught

and then released off its tail hook, then they would

move those aircraft off to their parking areas.

So you had aircraft handlers, you had plane captains,

you had the catapult officers and the catapult crew.

They're all out there on the deck.

You had fuelers, you had ordinance men,

you had everybody in different colored shirts

and helmets designating what their job was.

Some of them are in radio communication,

some of them it's just all hand signals.

And you've got the blast from the jets coming off.

Before an aircraft would launch, they'd put up

these jet block deflectors behind them

and then they'd drop it so the next aircraft could come up

on the catapult.

It's a very hot, windy, dangerous place to be.

One of the many aircraft Enterprise carried

in her early days was the A5 vigilante bomber,

which had a nuclear strike capability.

The combination of unlimited range

and the Vigilante's ability to deliver nuclear weapons

made the USS Enterprise the most powerful piece

of military hardware in the world.

Carriers like the Enterprise, their greatest

influence, I believe, on the Cold War, was to show

the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact and Allied Navies

just what the United States could produce,

and what the United States could produce in numbers

with their carrier battle groups all over the globe.

Although the US would switch to launching

nuclear weapons from submarines rather than carriers,

Enterprise has been at the sharp end of every major

US military maneuver over the last 50 years.

In 1961, when the USS Enterprise was brand new,

she took part in the Cuban missile crisis,

which nearly made the Cold War hot.

She carried out a number of tours off North Vietnam

from 1966 to 1973.

She operated in the Pacific, Mediterranean, the Atlantic.

Her aircraft took part in strikes against Namibia,

against Bosnia.

Her aircraft took part in the no-fly zone coverage over Iraq

in the early stages of conflict in the Persian Gulf.

She didn't finally pay off as an operational warship

until 2011.

And with more than 51 years of service

and 25 deployments,

she has always answered the call to serve.

It's a direct descendant of the sort of power

that can be projected by the US Navy in World War II,

and in the era of the Cold War, all it takes

is for a US carrier battle group to appear on the horizon

for the demands of the United States to be taken seriously.

The lesson of the Enterprise was clear.

Any nation considered a first ranked military power

needs an aircraft carrier capability.

It was a lesson Britain, the country

that had pioneered the use of air

and sea power, had all but forgotten.

But today, something truly extraordinary is being built

at a Scottish shipyard.

The Queen Elizabeth class carriers.

The Royal Navy had pioneered aircraft carrier technology.

It had been the first to combine air and sea power

in battle, and it had developed the first

recognizably modern aircraft carriers.

But since the defining battles of World War II,

it had been left behind by the US and other nations.

The new British Queen Elizabeth class comprises

two ships.

Queen Elizabeth, which is carrying out protracted sea trials

at the moment, and has sister ship, Prince of Wales.

It's due to go to sea in late 2019.

They're the biggest warships ever built

for the Royal Navy at 919 feet long.

They're a hundred feet longer than Ark Royal.

They were built Rosyth Dockyard just north of Edinburgh.

Three years ago here in Rosyth,

the naming of HMS Queen Elizabeth was a strategic awakening

for the United Kingdom.

The moment when we proved to the world

and to ourselves that we still have what it takes

to be a great maritime industrial nation.

What they give Britain is a strategic reach

that this country has not had since the older Ark Royal

class carriers were decommissioned.

The key feature of these ships is size.

It future-proofs them 'cause they're designed to last

for 50 years.

We don't know what aircraft will be around in 50 years time,

but we do know that the present generation will last

quite a long way into that.

But with size you can cope with change.

Is is as sophisticated as any aircraft carrier

that you'll find anywhere in the world.

Everything about the modern aircraft carrier has taken

everything we've learned in the previous 100 years

is now cemented into one package.

Everything about the new carrier's design

is intended to improve on all that have gone before.

The Prince of Wales and Queen Elizabeth

are very, very different.

The most obvious part of this difference

is the fact that they have two islands.

What they've done is taken those two traditional bits

that you have to have in any aircraft carrier

to make it work, the bit that controls the ship

and the bit that controls the flying,

and they've completely separated them out,

so that makes them visually very distinctive

but it also means that there is much less confusion

in the way they operate the ships.

The islands will hold some of the most advanced

military equipment ever installed, including a revolutionary

radar system which allows each ship to track 800 objects

in a 200 kilometer radius.

F-35b fighter jets will be the crucial component

to the air capability.

Four planes can be delivered from hangar

to flight deck in just 60 seconds.

And the carriers do it all with a much smaller crew.

An American carrier has a ship's company

of roughly 4,000 men to operate an air group

of about 70 aircraft.

Queen Elizabeth with the full air group embarked is expected

to have about 1,600 sailors on board,

plus 250 Marines if they're embarked,

so considerably less.

To do that, they use the sort of computer controlled

automation that supermarkets and Amazon would use.

In other words, one man with a touch screen

can control a robot to go and collect a bomb off a shelf

in a magazine and bring it via a railway line to a bomb lift

and then bring it up to the flight deck

where armorers can take it, fuse it

and put it on an airplane.

We've never had anything with that degree of automation

before, and they've got it.

The projection is that by the end of their working life,

they won't even be operating manned aircraft.

They'll all be drones.

So I don't think we even really know

what the full capability

of these ships is gonna be going forwards.

The Queen Elizabeth class is designed

to build on all the lessons of the aircraft carrier

through history, to be fearsome enough to project power,

but flexible enough to perform multiple tasks

in peace time too.

They are very much multi-mission vehicles

so they can function as aircraft carriers.

They can function as anti-submarine warfare ships.

They can form the core of a battle fleet

or act in conjunction with say, a US carrier battle group.

They can also take part in more peaceable activities,

pacification, anti-piracy,

and even disaster relief, which was the sort of thing

that we have used our amphibious landing ships for

in recent years.

I think there's no better proof really

that the carrier is still there as the apogee

of naval power than the fact that the Britain's Royal Navy

has invested vast sums in building two state-of-the-art

carriers, because there's nothing really to beat

a carrier as a means of power projection.

It's a piece of your own real estate

that you can take anywhere in the world to deploy in support

of land forces, to control the oceans, to protect trade.

They're incredibly versatile assets.

It's been over 100 years since those early

experiments of combining air and sea power in World War I.

100 in which aircraft carriers have featured

in the iconic battles of World War II,

policed the World during the Cold War

and remain center stage to the present day.

They are still today, perhaps arguably, the most complex,

expensive pieces of design and engineering

that humans are putting together on the planet,

even in an age of airliners and spacecraft.

The captain of the 1970s Ark Royal, Captain Fell,

once made I think a very good statement.

He said, "The role of my ship is to go anywhere

at high speed and do anything the British government

wants me to do when I arrive there."

And think about that.

That's precisely what they can do.

And the Royal Navy's commitment

to the Queen Elizabeth class carriers stands as testament

to the enduring importance

of these multifaceted fighting machines.