HMS Glorious was the second of the three Courageous-class battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy during the First World War. Glorious was paid off after the war, but was rebuilt as an aircraft carrier during the late 1920s.
After the start of the Second World War, Glorious spent the rest of 1939 unsuccessfully hunting for the commerce-raiding German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee. She was recalled home in April 1940 to support operations in Norway. While evacuating British aircraft from Norway in June, the ship was sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the North Sea with the loss of over 1,200 lives.
