Word: arkfuls
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...Ark began to list alarmingly to starboard-"at an angle suggesting a motor car with both wheels on one side off." On the flight and hangar decks mechanics and pilots worked frantically in an effort to launch the ship's planes, 60 Swordfish torpedo-carriers and Skua dive-bombers...
...Ark seemed to steady somewhat. Captain L. E. H. Maund, C.B.E., a few senior officers and a picked skeleton crew stayed aboard. Two hours later the men on the destroyer cheered when they heard an order for all rescued members of the engine-room crew to return to the Ark...
...switchboard was in smithereens, but with the help of portable apparatus they got generators going. They started the pumps, but the Ark was shipping water fast. They even managed to raise a head of steam but soon the gauges fell, the lights dimmed. It was hopeless. Captain Maund gave the final order to abandon ship...
...many hours later the men of the Ark learned that the big girl, top-heavy with her thick deck armor, had rolled over on her back, lifted herself a bit by the stern, like some great animal making a last stab at survival, then plunged. The men were heartbroken, not over the fact, inconsequential to most of them, that Britain's third carrier loss* left the Royal Navy only nine of these invaluable craft, but simply because their invulnerable, incomparable Ark was gone...
They had three consolations. Only one of Ark's 1,575 officers and men was lost. After all the Axis claims, the Ark's loss was announced to the world, not by the Axis but by the British Admiralty. And she had been sunk by a U-boat,† had not suffered the final indignity of being sunk by an Italian submarine...