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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday January 14, 2015: The Old Crow- Hunter Killer and Rocket Slinger

Here we see the converted United States Maritime Commission (MARCOM) Type C3-S-A1 cargo ship USS Croatan (CVE-25) riding high in her WWII livery as a Bogue-class escort carrier. This humble little vessel was the centerpiece of a small task force of second-rate ships that kept the sea-lanes open from the U.S. to Europe during WWII– and she accounted for no less than six of Hitler’s U-boats. As the man once said, “she may not look like much, but she sure can cook.”

The MARCOM needed cargo ships literally as fast as they could be built in World War II as the Germans were sinking hundreds of them every month. To help stop the bleeding they came up with a standardized design that could be cranked out in a minimum of time by any semi-competent ship builder. This was the Liberty and later Victory type ship. However, before the war, MARCOM had designed the C-type freighters to replace elderly Hog Islander-type cargo ships left over from the 1900s.

The C3 type were well-built and effective 492-foot long, 12,000-ton cargo ships powered by two boilers feeding a steam turbine that produced a total of 8500hp and could make a relatively fast 16.65-knots. Some 465 of these freighters were built between 1940 and 1944 and used by US shipping lines as late as the 1970s– far longer than most of their Liberty and Victory class follow-ons.

Forty-Five of these freighters were converted while still in the yard starting in 1942 to become escort carriers. You see the concept was simple: complete the hull below decks, then take the topside and slap a 439×70 foot wooden flight deck over it fed by two elevators from a hangar deck below that had once been cargo holds, erect a small tower island for flight operations on the edge of the starboard amidships, add a few AAA guns for defense against air attack (4 twin Bofors 40mm, 10 20mm Oerlikons) give them a couple popguns (low-angle 4″/50 caliber Mark 9 guns taken from WWI destroyers) for defense against surface ships, and add bunks for crews, bunkerage for avgas, and space for ordnance then call it a day.

The result was a 16,620-ton mini carrier that could carry a couple dozen single-engined aircraft and launch them with the aid of two hydraulic catapults. Typical airgroup was to be 12 F4F/FM-2 Grumman Wildcats (surplus to the war in the Pacific where they had been replaced by Hellcats and Corsairs) and 9 TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. Although several escort carriers saw combat in the Pacific, the Croatan was intended for the war against the Germans.

Named for Croatan Sound in North Carolina, the USS Croatan (CVE-25) was laid down 15 April 1942 (tax day!) at the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation of Seattle, Washington. Completed in 54 weeks, she was commissioned after brief builder’s trials on 28 April 1943 and rushed to the North Atlantic through the Panama Canal where the battle for that ocean was raging. She was an updated version of the original design, with a much better surface armament that traded in the old 4-inchers for more modern 5-inch/51 caliber guns and gave her 27 Oerlikons rather than the original 10.

Joining convoys to Europe in by summer, she exchanged blows with U-boats but did not sink any. That fall saw her shuttling Army Air Corps planes (P-40s etc.) to North Africa before returning to anti-submarine duties as the head of her own task force.

In the year from April 1944-April 1945, the Croatan hunter-killer group, made up of the carrier, her air wing and 2-3 destroyer escorts that drawn from the 1590-ton Edsall-class sisters USS Frost (DE-144), USS Huse (DE-145), USS Stanton (DE-247) and USS Inch (DE-146), was very successful.

Her aircraft would spot surfaced German submarines, mark them for attack and do what they could until the shark would submerge, then the escorts would respond as the hunters to the bird dogs, dropping depth charges until the sub, stricken and bleeding, would bob to the surface where the planes and ships would either coordinate to pick up survivors willing to surrender, or send the shark to the bottom.

The group’s victories include:

• April 7, 1944: U-856 (Type IXC/40 U-boat, 28 survivors picked up)
• April 26, 1944: U-488 (a Type XIV supply and replenishment U-boat “Milchkuh” sunk with all hands)
• June 11, 1944: U-490 (Another Milchkuh on her first patrol, all 60 hands picked up)
• July 3, 1944: U-154 (Type IXC who had taken 10 Allied steamers. no survivors)
• April 16, 1945: U-880 and U-1235 (both Type IXC/40 boats, no survivors from either)
• April 22, 1945: U-518 (Type IXC, all hands lost)

“The Old Crow” also played a role in the surrender of U-1228 just after the war ended.

While Croatan‘s record sounds amazing, she actually was outdone by her class leader, USS Bogue (CVE-9), who sank an incredible 12 German U-boats and 2 Japanese submarines in her wartime service, which was, arguably, longer than Croatan‘s and did feature a larger escort group often featuring as many as 8 destroyers. Class sister Card (CVE-11) also scratched 11 U-boats from Hitler’s Christmas Card list.

Don’t let this fool you; the war against the U-boats could be very dangerous for these little carriers. Croatan‘s sistership, USS Block Island (CVE-21), was sunk by the German U-549 northeast of the Canary Islands on 29 May 1944.

Croatan finished the war as a training carrier and in Magic Carpet service, bringing boys back from France. Thought still a young craft, she was decommissioned 20 May 1946 and mothballed, her days as a warship at an end.

There she sat in the James River for a decade until the Maritime Administration dusted her off, removed her armament, manned her with a civilian crew, and reclassified her USNS Croatan (T-AKV-43), an aviation transport, on 16 June 1958. As such, she could carry 20-30 modern jets or 50-60 helicopters from port to port where they would be lifted on and off via crane. She then spent the next dozen years shuttling hundreds of USAF jets and Army helicopters to Europe, Africa and Vietnam.

In 1964-65 she was even loaned out to NASA for an interesting series of tests.

The NASA mission included firing at least 77  Nike-Cajuns, Nike-Apaches, and small Arcas meteorological rockets from her deck to study the upper atmosphere and ionosphere during solar sunspot minimum, particularly the so-called “equatorial electrojet.” These shipboard firings were part of NASA’s contribution to the International Year of the Quiet Sun (IQSY).

According to research from Dwayne Day of the Space Review, “During the voyage, the ship’s crew consisted of about seventy-five civil service personnel with a launch team made up of about thirty engineers and technicians from Wallops Station. The number of scientists varied from eighteen to thirty-two.”

Finally, a flat-topped cargo ship in a world of nuclear powered super-carriers, she was stricken for good and sold for scrap in 1971.

As for the rest of her class, most of the Bouge-class carriers were sent to the Royal Navy (who termed them the Ameer/Attacker/Ruler class vessels with such bad-ass names as the HMS Striker and HMS Stalker and flying a mixture of Grumman Martlet, Hawker Sea Hurricane, Vought F4U Corsair fighter aircraft and Fairey Swordfish anti-submarine aircraft) who rapidly scrapped them in the 1950s.

Just ten Bogues served in the U.S. Fleet and most were retired from service rapidly after the war. One, USS Barnes (CVE-20), was briefly retained as a ‘helicopter escort carrier’ (CVHE-20) testing the LPH concept until she was scrapped in 1959. Like Croatan, three of her sisters USS Card (CVE-11/AKV-40), USS Core (CVE-13/T-AKV-41) and USS Breton (CVE-23/T-AKV-42), served in the 1960s as non-commissioned aviation transports and were scrapped by 1972. Card had the misfortune of being the only “aircraft carrier” both to have been sunk by frogmen and to have been sunk since the end of WWII.

There is no preserved escort carrier in the world today. Their memory, however, is maintained by the Escort Carrier Sailors & Airmen Association.

Specs:

Displacement: 16,620 long tons (16,890 t)
Length: 496 ft. (151 m);
flight deck: 439 ft. (134 m)
Beam: 69 ft. 6 in (21.18 m);
flight deck: 70 ft (21 m)
Draught: 26 ft (7.9 m)
Installed power: 8,500 shp (6,300 kW)
Propulsion: 2 × geared steam turbines
2 × boilers
1 × shaft
Speed: 18 kn (21 mph; 33 km/h)
Complement: 646, excluding Air Group of 234, 890 total
Radar: SG, SC-3
Armament: 2 × 5-inch/51 caliber guns (1 × 2)
8 × 40 mm anti-aircraft guns (4 × 2)
27 × 20 mm anti-aircraft cannons (singles)
Aircraft carried: 19-24;
(Typical complement: 12 × fighters (Grumman F4F Wildcats)
9 × torpedo bombers (Grumman TBF Avengers))
Aviation facilities: 2 × elevators

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