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Warship Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024: Inadvertent Records

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024: Inadvertent Records

Above we see a great action shot of the late Victorian-era Hermes class protected cruiser HMS Highflyer living up to her name while fighting the Atlantic, circa 1905.

Although a dated design by the time of the Great War, Highflyer still made short work of a faster and larger German auxiliary cruiser some 110 years ago this week.

The Hermes Class

The Admiralty, starting in 1889, began to order several successive batches of “second-class” protected cruisers: rakish steel-hulled steamers capable of 20 or so knots (fast for their age) and, while girded with an internal curved steel armored deck protecting their vital machinery spaces, weren’t meant primarily for fleet-on-fleet action but instead tasked with the role of overseas patrol and protection.

With an armament of 6 and 4.7-inch QF guns and a few torpedo tubes, as well as the ability to land 100 or so Tars armed as light infantry for work ashore, these vessels were seen as capable of keeping the peace against either local rebellions or foreign interlopers short of a battleship during times of peace. In times of war– something not seen against a European power by the Royal Navy since the Crimea– such warships could both capture enemy shipping, using the very gentlemanly “cruiser prize rules” and protect the crown’s own merchantmen from the enemy’s own raiders.

In the short period between just 1889 and 1898, the Royal Navy ordered 38 of these cruisers: 21 Apollo-class (3,600t, 19.75kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 4x 14″ TT), 8 Astraea-class (4,360t, 19.5kts, 2×6″, 8×4.7″, 1x 18″ TT), and 9 Eclipse-class (5,600t, 18.5kts, 5×6″, 6×4.7″, 3x 18″ TT).

Following in the wake of this hectic building spree, the Admiralty ordered a further five vessels in the Estimates of 1896-1901, laid down in five different yards. Repeats of the Eclipse class with a few tweaks, the Hermes (or Highflyer) class were roughly the same size, a little faster, and carried a more homogenous armament of 11 6″/40 (15.2 cm) QF Mark I guns instead of the mixed 6-inch/4.7-inch batteries.

These were arranged in single open mounts, one forward, two aft, and eight arranged in broadside. Armored with a 3-inch thick steel front shield, these mounts were capable of lobbing a 100-pound HE shell to 10,000 yards at a rate of fire of 5-to-7 rounds per minute depending on crew training.

Two 6″/40 (15.2 cm) guns on the aft quarterdeck aft of HMS Hermes.

The 373-foot Hermes/Highflyer class, second-rate protected cruiser HMS Hyacinth pictured c1902. This three-color peacetime livery shows off her waist broadside 6-inchers well.

For countering torpedo boats, these new cruisers would carry nine 3″/40 12pdr 12cwt QF Mk Is and a half-dozen 47mm/40 3pdr Hotchkiss Mk I guns. Their torpedo battery consisted of two 18-inch tubes below the waterline on the beam. Two Maxim machine guns and an 800-pound QF 12-pounder 8 cwt landing gun on a carriage were also carried for the ship’s ashore force.

Carrying 500 tons of Harvey armor, this ranged from 6 inches on the CT to 5 inches over the engine hatches with a 3-inch deck.

Powered by 18 Bellville boilers which drove a pair of 4-cylinder VTEs on two screws, the designed speed was 20 knots with a planned endurance, on 1,100 tons (max load) of good coal, of 3,300nm at 18 knots. On builder’s trials, over an eight-hour course at full power, most beat the 20-knot guideline while, when driving at 30 hours on 3/4 power, still ranged from 17.34 to 19.4 knots. Not bad for the 1900s.

Published builder’s speed trials for 1899, with three of our class, Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, listed in the middle:

With a 21-foot draft (more when carrying a double load of coal), these cruisers carried a flotilla of small boats including two 36-foot sail pinnaces, a 32-foot steam cutter, a 30-foot gig, and several smaller gigs and whalers as ship-to-shore connectors.

Listed in journals as having a 450-man ship’s company, this size was often larger during peacetime overseas sailing– especially when an RM platoon was embarked– and drastically reduced while in ordinary.

The class consisted of five cruisers: the first flight Hermes, Highflyer, and Hyacinth, then the follow-on modified (with heavier boilers) Challenger and Encounter.

Jane’s 1914 listing for the class.

Meet Highflyer

Our subject is the fourth Royal Navy vessel named Highflyer, a tradition that began with the (brief) capture and reuse of the 5-gun American privateer of that name in 1813 by the HMS Poictiers. The second was a small 2-gun tender while the third was a well-traveled 21-gun wooden-hulled screw frigate that served in the Crimean War and the Second Opium War with time out to bombard the Arab fort at Al Zorah.

Ordered alongside class leader Hermes (Yard No. 401) at Fairfield, Govan, Highflyer was Yard No. 402 and was laid down on 7 June 1897. Launched on 4 June 1898, she was completed on 7 December 1899– the last RN cruiser commissioned in the 19th Century.

Peacetime career

Dispatched to serve as the flagship of RADM Day Bosanquet’s East Indies Station, Highflyer set out in February 1900 for Trincomalee, Ceylon. There she remained for over three years, cruising around the region as directed, and served the same mission for the next East Indies Station commander, RADM Charles Carter Drury.

HMS Highflyer NH 60585

Next came a stint as flag for the North America and West Indies Station, again under RADM Bosanquet until 1908 when she was rotated back to England for drydocking and refit.

HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 42674)

Again deploying overseas, she left for East Indies Station in early 1911 to relieve her sister Hyacinth, and carried the flag of RADM Edmond Slade until April 1913.

Relieved by HMS Swiftsure, Highflyer was sent back to England to join the 3rd Fleet, detailed as a training ship for the new Special Entry Cadet scheme which took lads 17½ to 18½ years of age and gave them up to 18 months of training before sending them to the fleet. Such training meant hours and hours of holystoning decks, chipping and painting bulkheads, polishing brightwork, and drills, drills, drills.

HMS Highflyer IWM (Q 75385)

Her “lucky 13th” skipper, Capt. Henry Tritton Buller, assumed command on 1 July 1913.

Her complement was nearly doubled during this period, as noted by this log entry while at Chatam in late 1913.

Officers: 32
Seamen: 164
Boys: 24
Marines: 50
Engine-room establishment: 134
Other non-executive ratings: 466

She undertook a three-month Med training cruise in the Spring of 1914, roaming to Malta from Devonport with stops at Villefranche, Tangier, Naples, Algiers, and Gibraltar.

War!

With Europe under tension of war, on 13 July 1914 at 0100, Highflyer logged a note to mobilize for fleet service and began receiving Marines and ratings from the Devonport depots and hospital. Three days later, she weighed anchor for Spithead via Bournemouth, leading the Astraea-class protected cruiser HMS Charybdis and class leader HMS Eclipse out to sea.

Putting in at Portsmouth, she soon took on ammunition and coal. With Sarajevo on fire from Austrian shells and the Kaiser sending his troops into Belgium, on 3 August, Highflyer’s complement– augmented by fresh reservists arriving every day– began fuzing lyddite shells and arranging torpedoes.

With the news of war declared against Germany flashed at 23:23 on 4 August, Highflyer made ready to prepare for battle and sortied out into the Channel with the Arrogant-class cruiser HMS Vindictive.

On the morning of the second day of Britain’s war, Highflyer spotted the 13,000-ton Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd liner SS Tubantia and promptly stopped her for inspection. Returning from Buenos Aires with £500,000 in gold destined for German banks, the liner’s steerage berths held 150 German military reservists returning home from South America and a cargo of Argentine grain likewise destined for the Vaterland.

With such a floating violation of neutrality, Highflyer’s prize crew directed the liner to Plymouth with the cruiser closely escorting. Once there on 6 August, Royal Marines escorted the German reservists off while the gold was confiscated– along with her German-bound mail which included bundles of rubber and wool– and taken ashore.

Tubantia, relieved of contraband, was later released and allowed to resume her voyage.

Putting back to sea to patrol the Bay of Biscay for German blockade runners, Highflyer sailed to Gibraltar and, with orders for Cape Verde, it was off the Spanish Northwest African enclave of Río de Oro
that she spotted a familiar ship on the morning of 26 August.

The Norddeutscher Lloyd liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, at 24,000 tons and 649 feet overall, was the largest ship in the world when she put to sea in 1897.

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69220

Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse circa 1897 card by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y. LC-USZ62-69219

Capable of carrying as many as 1,500 passengers, the liner’s Baroque revival decor, overseen by Johann Poppe, can be seen in this view of her smoking cabin, North German Lloyd pamphlet c. 1905. LC-DIG-ppmsca-02202

Size comparison by the Gray Lithograph company for the lines North German Lines of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse with the Trinity Church, the St. Paul Building in New York, the Washington Monument, and the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-50050

One of the fastest ships in the world as well, she twice captured the Blue Riband, sustaining a 22.3 knot Atlantic crossing in 1898.

By July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse caught orders to chop over to the Kaiserliche Marine and, while at Bremerhaven, quickly converted to become an auxiliary cruiser (hilfskreuzer) under the command of Fregattenkapitän Max Reymann. While she had been designed to carry as many as eight 5.9-inch and four 4.7-inch guns as well as up to 14 Spandau machine guns, only four old 4.1-inchers were on hand for the conversion.

Ordered to sea on 4 August to take a route northeast of Iceland, Reymann took his barely converted cruiser to sea, with orders to make for the South Atlantic. He promptly sank three British ships, taking 126 of their crew aboard. Several other ships were stopped but the enemy passenger problem was getting out of hand so Reymann simply disabled their wireless and allowed them to proceed.

KWdG’s brief raiding record:

7 August: trawler Tubal Cain (227 GRT), sunk.
15 August: passenger ship Galician (6,757 GRT), allowed to proceed.
15 August: passenger ship Arlanza (15,044 GRT), allowed to proceed.
16 August: frozen meat freight Kaipara (7,392 GRT) and Nyanga (3,066 GRT), sunk.
16 August: coal steamer Arucas, captured for use as an escort ship with a prize crew.

Needing a breather from the Royal Navy dragnet looking for him, Reymann put into Río de Oro for a couple of days on 17 August to take coal from Arucas and two German ships (Magdeburg and Bethania) sheltering there.

Reymann never got to finish his cruise before Highflyer appeared on the horizon on the 26th in what was, technically, a breach of neutrality.

A series of signals were exchanged between the two ships:

Highflyer: “Surrender.”

Highflyer: “I demand your surrender.”

KWdG: “German warships will not surrender. I request you to respect Spanish neutrality.”

Highflyer: “This is the second time you have been coaling in this harbor, I demand that you surrender; if not, I will open fire on you immediately.”

KWdG: “This is the first time I’m coaling here, and besides, this is a Spanish matter.”

Highflyer: “Surrender immediately.”

KWdG: “I have nothing more to say to you.”

Putting ashore his prisoners and non-combatant complement, Reymann figured the end was near, and, sailing out, Highflyer soon opened up at 1515, with the German replying.

Although KWdG was faster, Highflyer had an excellent position and continued to exchange fire with her larger guns at ranges past 7,500 yards while the artillery duel between the two lasted until 1615 when the German ship ceased fire and, smoking, withdrew behind some sand hills.

Reymann, low on ammunition and with two men dead and zero chance of escaping, smashed his wireless, scuttled his ship (she had rolled on her side by 1710), and put his crew ashore via lifeboats.

The shipless Fregattenkapitän and his men landed on a Saharan beach five miles from the Spanish fort at Villa Cisneros (Al-Dakhla) where they were interred.

Buller, ever the gentleman, attempted to send his own medical teams to help the crew of the German cruiser but recalled them once he determined they were not needed. Highflyer suffered one killed– RJ Lobb, Leading Carpenter’s Crew, ON M.2882– and 10 wounded during the engagement. A prize court would later grant Highflyer’s crew £2,680 for the sinking.

The battle made Highflyer famous, and newspapers around the globe celebrated the fight. 

Assuming the flag of the Cape Verde station by October, Highflyer remained on a sharp lookout for German raiders and runners for the next two years without the same sort of brilliant luck she had in the first three weeks of the war. She spent much of this time combing the seas off West Africa, often haunting Sierra Leone and St. Vincent.

By 1917, she was engaged in cross-Atlantic convoy escorts from Halifax to Plymouth as part of the North American Squadron.

May 1917,”S.S. Durham Castle with [S.S.] Ayrshire and HMS Highflyer ahead.” Exterior view from the deck of the SS Durham Castle looking fore at two ships ahead. Lt. Irvine of the RAMC, having just graduated in medicine, was shipping out on the SS Durham Castle to the campaign in German East Africa. The image is from an album chronicling the wartime experiences of Archibald Clive Irvine (1893-1974) in East Africa. During this time he would meet Dr John W Arthur which in turn would lead to his missionary work at Chogoria in Kenya. Acc.12016/1 (reference number), International Mission Photography Archive, ca.1860-ca.1960 (collection), National Library of Scotland (subcollection), NLS DOD ID: 97047298 (file).

It was while at Halifax on 6 December that Highflyer had a ringside seat for the great Halifax explosion when a collision between the relief ship SS Imo and the munitions ship SS Mont Blanc sent the latter sky-high in the world’s largest pre-atomic explosion, killing over 1,900.

With the Mont Blanc ablaze and abandoned by its crew, six volunteers from Highflyer rowed almost a mile across the harbor to the ship to offer assistance. All perished but one when the Mont Blanc’s cargo exploded when the whaler was only 300 feet away.

The survivor, Second Class Able Seaman William Becker, J5841, was propelled 1,600 yards across the harbor by the explosion. Becker swam through the icy water to safety and lived until 1969. He earned an Albert Medal and was entered in the Guinness Book as the “Farthest-Flying Human Projectile (Involuntary).”

From Highflyer’s deck log:

8:40 am: Port watch of stokers landed for route march.
8:45 am: Collision between IMO (Belgian relief ship) and S.S. MONT BLANC (French) .
8:48 am: Fire broke out on MONT BLANC.
8:55 am: Commander Triggs and Lieutenant Ruffles proceeded in whaler to investigate.
9:08 am: Mont Blanc exploded (cargo, ammunition previously unknown) causing large wave and setting Richmond on fire. Damage was done to HIGHFLYER and to most of its boats. The skiff was sent to find the whaler’s crew and picked up Murphy AB who was unconscious and later died. Becker AB was found on the shore, having swum there. No trace of the remainder of the whaler’s crew was found. HIGHFLYER received wounded from other ships, made temporary repairs and cleared debris. The ship had to be unmoored at one point because of the danger from its proximity to the PICTON and the fires. The watch of stokers which had been landed administered first aid on shore.
Casualties
Killed
Jones, Robert DCS 270699 ERA 1st class
Kelly, Francis DK 21331 Sto. 1st class
Rogers, Edn. Benjamin DK 33240 Sto. 1st class
Murphy, Joseph DJ 2308 Able Seaman, [who was picked up in the water] (whaler’s crew)
Missing (Whaler’s crew)
Triggs, Tom Kenneth Commander
Ruffles, James Rayward Lieutenant RNR
Rushen, Claude Eggleton LS DCS 234241
Fowling, James Able Seaman DCS 22261
Prewer, Samuel David Able Seaman DCS 236276
Wounded: 2
Slightly Wounded 25
Minor Injuries 20
Several Officers with facial injuries and injured tympanic membranes who carried on with their duties.
From other ships:
2 Pte. of Composite Regiment
2 of crew of Tug HILFORD (one, Perrin, Charles died later)
5 from S.S. PICTON
6 from S.S. IMO
3 others injured
55 other survivors, several with minor injuries were accommodated on board

Halifax explosion, with HMS Highflyer shown in the channel, via the Halifax Naval Museum

Repaired at Devonport, Highflyer was sent to Bermuda to serve as a guard and station ship for the first half of 1918 then returned to convoy work, escorting Yanks to Europe. She was off Glasgow on one such run when the Armistice was announced on 11 November.

Late-war she apparently had a dazzle scheme drawn up by British Vorticist (the very English modernist movement that grew out of Cubism) artist Edward Wadsworth who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the Great War.

HMS Highflyer, 1917 dazzle camo, Edward Wadsworth Art.IWM DAZ 37

Following a post-war refit at Devonport, Highflyer was sent once more to assume the role of flagship for the East Indies Station. Hoisting the flag of RADM Hugh H. D. Tothill, she held down the station from July 1919 to January 1921.

Paid off, she was sold for scrap at Bombay on 10 June 1921, at the time, she was the last Victorian-era cruiser in RN service.

Epilogue

The RN has not reissued the name “Highflyer” to another vessel.

However, in a salute to her extensive service on the East Indies Station– which was both her first and last posting– the “stone frigate” of the Royal Navy shore establishment in Trincomalee was named HMS Highflyer from 1943 until 1958 when the dockyard, wireless station, hospital, and headquarters facility was taken over by the Royal Ceylon Navy. I believe the old cruiser’s bell was located there during WWII but I can’t discern if/where it still exists. 

Our cruiser is remembered in maritime art.

HMS Highflyer by Alma Claude Burlton Cull 1880-1931

As well as in Delandres vignettes from the period.  

Of her sisters and half-sisters, Hermes was converted to a seaplane carrier in 1913, and sunk on 31 October 1914 by SM U 27.

HMS Hermes, sank after being struck by a torpedo from U-27 on October 31, 1914

Hyacinth spent her Great War career off Africa and assisted in the blockade of the German cruiser SMS Konigsberg there. She was decommissioned in 1919.

HMS Hyacinth listed to increase the range of her 6-inch guns, firing on German positions north of Lukuledi River, Lindi, German East Africa, 11th June 1917.

Near-sisters Challenger and Encounter, the latter in Australian service, spent the Great War off Africa and in the Pacific. While Challenger was broken up in 1920, Encounter would endure as a disarmed depot ship for the Royal Australian Navy throughout the 1920s until she was scuttled in 1932.

Modified Hermes class Challenger class protected cruiser HMAS Encounter IWM (Q 75381)

As for Highflyer’s hard-charging early war skipper, who captured Tubantia and sank Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, Admiral Sir Henry Tritton Buller, G.C.V.O., C.B., went on to command three different battleships and HM yachts before moving to the retired list in 1931. He passed in 1960, aged 86.

Meanwhile, KWdG’s skipper, Max Reymann, released himself from Spanish custody and managed to make it as far as Switzerland before the war ended. The bulk of his crew, some 350 men, were not as lucky and, catching a ride to the U.S. aboard the Spanish steamer Bethania, were intercepted in the Caribbean by the British armored cruiser HMS Essex and spent the rest of their war in a POW camp in Jamacia. Reymann returned to service, was appointed president of the Marinefriedenskommission (Naval Peace Commission) with the post-war Reichsmarine, and retired as a vice admiral in 1923. He passed in 1948, aged 76. He is remembered on the Ehrenrangliste der Kaiserlich Deutschen Marine (list of honorable men of the Imperial German Navy.)

Kaiser Wilhelm der Große, partially salvaged, is still in Rio de Oro, now in Moroccan waters. What is left of her wreck was located in shallow waters in 2013 and can be dived, with the proper permission.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 22, 2024: Ghosts of Gagil Tomil

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 22, 2024: Ghosts of Gagil Tomil

Via the U.S. Navy SEAL Museum.

Above we see UDT-10 swimmers (left to right) S1c Leonard Barnhill, SP(A)1c John MacMahon, LT M.R. Massey, SP(X)1c Bill Moore, and QM3c Warren Christensen on the cramped mess deck of the Balao-class fleet boat USS Burrfish (SS-312) on the early morning of 17 August 1944. Note the hearty “welcome home” breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee fortified with medicinal 6-year-old Overholt straight rye whiskey along with the diver’s working uniform of grease, grenades, knives, and swim trunks.

These men would mount the first and only submarine-launched reconnaissance operation accomplished by the Pacific UDTs during WWII, some 80 years ago this month.

Some of them are still missing.

The Balao Class

A member of the 180+-ship Balao class, she was one of the most mature U.S. Navy diesel designs of the World War Two era, constructed with knowledge gained from the earlier Gato class. Unlike those of many navies of the day, U.S. subs were “fleet” boats, capable of unsupported operations in deep water far from home. The Balao class was deeper diving (400 ft. test depth) than the Gato class (300 feet) due to the use of high-yield strength steel in the pressure hull.

Able to range 11,000 nautical miles on their reliable diesel engines, they could undertake 75-day patrols that could span the immensity of the Pacific. Carrying 24 (often unreliable) Mk14 Torpedoes, these subs often sank anything short of a 5,000-ton Maru or warship by surfacing and using their deck guns. They also served as the firetrucks of the fleet, rescuing downed naval aviators from right under the noses of Japanese warships.

Some 311 feet long overall, they were all-welded construction to facilitate rapid building. Best yet, they could be made for the bargain price of about $7 million in 1944 dollars (just $100 million when adjusted for today’s inflation) and completed from keel laying to commissioning in about nine months.

An amazing 121 Balaos were completed through five yards at the same time, with the following pennant numbers completed by each:

  • Cramp: SS-292, 293, 295-303, 425, 426 (12 boats)
  • Electric Boat: 308-313, 315, 317-331, 332-352 (42)
  • Manitowoc on the Great Lakes: 362-368, 370, 372-378 (15)
  • Mare Island on the West Coast: 304, 305, 307, 411-416 (9)
  • Portsmouth Navy Yard: 285-288, 291, 381-410, 417-424 (43)

We have covered a number of this class before, such as the sub-killing USS Greenfish, rocket mail slinger USS Barbero, the carrier-slaying USS Archerfish, the long-serving USS Catfish, the U-boat scuttling USS Atule, Spain’s “30-one-and-only,” and the frogman Cadillac USS Perch —but don’t complain, they have lots of great stories

Meet Burrfish

Our subject is the only U.S. Navy warship to carry the name of the tiny Atlantic swellfish. Built by the Portsmouth Navy Yard, she was laid down on 24 February 1943, launched that June, and commissioned on 14 September– her construction spanning just 202 days.

Officers and crewmen salute the colors as the Burrfish (SS-312) slides into the Atlantic at Portsmouth Navy Yard, Portsmouth, N.H., 18 June 1943 via Subvets

Her first skipper was 32-year-old LT (T/Cdr) William Beckwith Perkins, Jr., USN (USNA 1932), late of the Panama Canal Zone’s guardian submarine “Sugar Boat” USS S-11 (SS 116). A Keystoner born in Upper Turkeyfoot Township, Pennsylvania, he was the grandson of a swashbuckling horse soldier, Isaac Otey Perkins, who rode with the 5th Virginia Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War. Meanwhile, his uncle, Col. Nathaniel James Perkins, was head of the Fork Union Military Academy, which LT Perkins attended before his appointment to Annapolis.

After a four-month 8,000-mile shakedown cruise from New London to Key West– where she took part in two weeks of ASW exercises– through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor where Burrfish arrived on 6 January 1944, she prepped for her first war patrol. This included 11 underway exercises (four at night), degaussing, and sound listening tests.

1943-1944 USS Burrfish commanding officer William Beckwith Perkins, Jr. on the right in the second row.

War!

Getting into it, Burrfish departed Pearl Harbor on 2 February 1944 for her 1st War Patrol. She was ordered to patrol in the Caroline Islands area. She was a new boat with a green crew. It was the first war patrol for not only her skipper but also for 53 of her 83-member crew– some of which were added just a day before sailing. Her XO, LT Talbot Edward Harper (USNA 1937), had made five patrols already on the USS Greyback.

Burrfish met the enemy for the first time on 10 February– a Betty bomber while she was on the surface– and both left unharmed.

Sailing through a Japanese convoy on Valentine’s Day 1944 and firing off four unsuccessful Mark 14 torpedoes, she was depth charged for two hours, counting 22 strings of cans while she went deep– 500 feet– to avoid death. Keep in mind test depth on Balaos was listed as 400 feet.

She was depth charged again by a Japanese destroyer (8 cans) on 17 February.

This pace continued for the rest of the month, concluding on Leap Day when she fired three unsuccessful Mark 14s at a large Japanese freighter accompanied by two escorts and received 33 depth charges in return.

March likewise brought a three-torpedo attack on an escorted transport on the 3rd, which was unsuccessful.

Recalled, Burrfish ended her 1st War Patrol at Midway on 22 March, with several leaks from depth charge attacks and her unusable No. 1 torpedo tube which was jammed in two feet. She had counted 30 Japanese air contacts and 13 ship contacts in her 9,561-mile, 53-day sortie but failed to claim any.

A Combat Insignia for the patrol was not authorized by ComSubPac.

Three weeks later, repaired, rearmed, restored, and refueled, she left on her 2nd War Patrol on 14 April, ordered to stalk the Japanese Home Islands, east of Kyushu and south of Honshu. Her crew at this point was mostly made up of men who had earned their “dolphins” and she carried fish with updated warheads.

Logging 16 shipping contacts, mostly trawlers, Burrfish hit paydirt on the early morning of 7 May when she came across a tanker and, after stalking it for three hours, pumping three Mk 14-3As into its hull.

Post-war review boards confirmed she sank the German oiler Rossbach (5984 GRT) formerly the Norwegian A/S Norsk Rutefart-operated D/T Madrono, south of Murotosaki, Japan. She had been seized by the Hilfskreuzer Thor in June 1942.

The Britsh-built Madrono was caught by Thor while traveling in ballast from Melbourne to Abadan. While her Norwegian crew spent the rest of the war in Yokohama, Burrfish sent the tanker to the bottom with her German prize crew aboard.

Burrfish ended her second patrol at Pearl Harbor on 4 June, having covered 9,370 miles in 52 days, and was allowed her first Combat Insignia for her successful patrol. Her original XO, Talbot Harper, left the boat to receive command of USS Kingfish (SS 234), which he would take out on four war patrols and bag seven Japanese ships, earning the Silver Star in the process.

Then came the Yap operation

Frogman mission

With the need to map Axis-held beaches and clear obstacles for follow-on landings, the Navy began standing up what would become Navy Combat Demolition Units and later Underwater Demolition Teams in the early summer of 1943. Basic training was conducted in a nine-week program at Fort Pierce, Florida, later followed by six weeks of advanced training at the NCDT&E depot in Maui for Pacific-bound UDTs. The first teams to see combat were UDT-1 and UDT-2, which hit the beach during Operation Flintlock at Kwajalein and Roy-Namur in January 1944.

These “Demolitioneers” were primarily recruited from the Seabee dynamiting and demolition school but also included bluejackets from the fleet and the occasional Coast Guardsman. In the end, some 34 UDT teams were formed, 21 of which saw combat. Organized in four dive platoons and one HQ section, the units consisted of 13 officers (plus an Army and Navy liaison officer) and 70 (later 85) enlisted men. One team, UDT-10, absorbed five officers and 24 enlisted who had been trained as OSS Special Maritime Unit combat swimmers whose group, Operational Swimmer Group (OSG) II had been pushed into more mainstream use by Nimitz.

It was in early June that it was decided, by request of 3rd Amphibious Force Commander, VADM Teddy Wilkinson to ComSubPac, that a submarine make a reconnaissance of the Japanese-occupied Palau Islands so that Wilkinson and his staff knew what they were up against.

Burrfish drew the duty and was specially modified to carry a pared-down UDT platoon and its equipment. Two 7-man LCRS rubber rafts and several sets of oars were stored deflated in a pair of free-flooding, ventilated, 8-foot-long cylindrical tanks fitted to the sub’s deck abaft the conning tower. The boats were inflated topside through the use of a special valve fitted to her whistle line. Four torpedoes were landed from her forward torpedo room and the empty skids were arranged with mattresses for the 11-man team.

Special equipment, a German-made Bentzin Primarflex camera on a custom bracket, was rigged to allow the sub to take panoramic photos via her periscope while submerged. The trick had been learned on the USS Nautilus off Tarawa by her XO, LT Richard “Ozzie” Lynch who had tried and failed with three Navy-issued cameras before experimenting with his own personal Primarflex to outstanding results.

The Navy soon acquired a dozen of the German cameras, primarily second-hand via discreet classified ads in photography magazines, for submarine surveillance use.

Burrfish was also detailed to collect hydrographic data on the ocean currents in and around the islands.

The UDT Special-Mission Group assigned to Burrfish comprised Lt. Charles Kirkpatrick as commander, an unnamed support member, and nine assorted swimmers. Five of these divers– QM1c Robert A. Black, Jr. (8114404); SP(A)1c John MacMahon (4027186); SP(X)1c William Moore (6339607); S1c Leonard Barnhill (8903302); and QM3c Warren Christensen (8697250)– were OSS OSG II men from the newly formed UDT-10 which had only arrived from Fort Pierce that June and was just wrapping up its advanced training in Maui. Two (LT M.R. Massey and CGM Howard “Red” Roeder) were instructors tapped from UDT-1’s battle-hardened Maui training cadre. While two senior men (CBM John E. Ball and CM3c Emmet L. Carpenter) were drawn from the staff of Sub Base, Pearl Harbor.

This 11-member UDT det was carried in addition to Burrfish’s 72-member crew, 53 of which had already earned their dolphins on prior patrols.

Burrfish departed from Pearl Harbor for her 3rd War Patrol with her frogmen on 11 July, topping off her tanks at Midway on the 15th before continuing West. Starting on the 22nd, she began experiencing severe Japanese air activity whenever she surfaced and observed the patrol planes to be DF-ing her radar so she secured her SD and SJ sets and relied on her primitive APR-1 radar warning receiver and SPA-1 pulse analyzer equipment for the rest of the mission.

Closing with Angaur and Yap Islands by 29 July, she spent the next three weeks inspecting the beaches each morning and conducting submerged pericope photography– filling 16 rolls of 35mm film– and closely verifying and updating the pre-war Admiralty charts she had on hand for the islands. Bathythermograph cards were scrutinized and carefully logged to note thermoclines.

Night drifting on the surface with the UDT recon team posted as topside lookouts while the radar gang listened to the APR/SPA gear allowing Burrfish to effectively discover and map out the four Japanese search radars in the area.

On 9 August, Burrfish rendezvoused with sister USS Balao some 20 miles offshore. After challenging and confirming each other from 30,000 yards via quick SJ radar blips, a rubber boat was sent over at 2300 to transfer the film and data collected thus far so that, should Burrfish be lost in her subsequent inshore beach recon via swimmer, at least the collected intel would get back to VADM Wilkinson’s staff.

Between 11 and 18 August, Burrfish closed in close enough (3,000 yards) to send recon swimmers ashore three times via their man-powered rubber rafts, swimming the final 500 yards to deploy two pairs of swimmers while a fifth man remained behind with the raft. The UDT men visited the southeast tip of Peleliu Island and Yap on the first two trips, saving the northeast coast or Gagil Tomil for the third mission.

It was at Gagil Tomil on the night of 18/19 August that three men– Black, Roeder, and MacMahon– failed to return to Burrfish before dawn forced the sub to withdraw and submerge.

As noted by the DPAA on the three missing men: 

After setting out, one team returned to the boat after one of the swimmers became exhausted in the surf. His partner then returned to the island. The two men now in the boat waited until past the appointed rendezvous time for the swimmers to return. With no sign of the others, the men in the boat rowed closer to shore to investigate. They risked discovery by using flashlights to attempt to make contact, but received no response. Finally, the two men were forced to abandon the search and return to the submarine.

Scouting the shoreline the next day from dangerously close in, Burrfish failed to catch sight of the trio.

They repeated the same forlorn wait on the 20th.

Ordered to leave, LCDR Perkins regretfully complied. All three of the missing swimmers eventually received the Silver Star, posthumously.

Crew members of UDT 10 on submarine Burrfish at Peliliu. L-R Chief Ball, John MacMahon (MIA), Bob Black (MIA), Emmet L. Carpenter, Chief Howard Roeder. Via the U.S. Navy SEAL Museum.

Perkins noted in his report, “In this officer’s experience, this group of men was outstanding – both professionally and as shipmates. They have had a long and difficult cruise in the submarine but have acquitted themselves admirably. It is a tragedy that Roeder, MacMahon, and Black are not on board.”

Burrfish concluded her 3rd Patrol at Majuro in the Marshall Islands after 47 days at sea on 27 August, logging 10,600 miles. It was deemed a successful patrol due to the quantity and quality of information obtained, with a Combat Insignia authorized by ComSubPac. However, all further UDT operations in the Pacific would be via littoral capable surface ships, typically APDs (converted destroyers, aka “Green Dragons”) and LCIs/LSTs.

On return to Hawaii, the three remaining OSS OSG II members of the UDT Special Mission Group (Christensen, Barnhill, and Moore) were put in for silver stars (all others recommended for bronze) and rolled into the Maui cadre to train incoming swimmers from the states.

With Station HYPO decoding subsequent enemy transmissions that the three missing UDT men were captured alive by the Japanese and interrogated by notoriously brutal Intelligence specialists who labeled them as members of a “Bakuha-tai” (demolition unit), the pending invasion of Yap was scrubbed, and the group was bypassed in line with the U.S. island-hopping strategy, her 6,000 man garrison surrendering post-war.

Meanwhile, the operation to capture Palau and Peleliu (Operation Stalemate II) would kick off in mid-September.

By that time, Burrfish was already on another war patrol.

Wolfpack Nights

Following a three-week turnaround alongside the sub tender USS Sperry, Burrfish departed from Majuro for her 4th War Patrol on 18 September 1944, bound for the Bonin Islands.

The patrol would be an extended operation in two parts, conducted as an element of a Yankee Wolfpack (Coordinated Attack Group 17.24) under the overall command of CDR Thomas “Burt” Klakring, commander of SubDiv 101, who would fly his flag on USS Silversides (SS 236) as afloat commodore.

The group, unofficially dubbed “Burt’s Brooms,” included not only Silversides and Burrfish but also USS Saury (SS 189), Tambor (SS 198), Trigger (SS 237), Sterlet (SS 392), and Ronquil (SS 396). While several of the boats were very seasoned– Saury, Silversides, and Trigger were on their 11th and 12th War Patrols (and would retire from combat service at the end of the patrol) — others were decidedly green, with Ronquil and Sterlet only on their second patrols.

The first phase, which lasted 48 days in the Nansei Shoto area, saw the Burrfish claim a pre-dawn 27 October kill (not confirmed by post-war boards) on an 8,500-ton cargo ship after she fired six torpedoes into a Japanese convoy and heard three explosions.

She also survived an encounter on 30 October in which an armed vessel fired a 6-round salvo at her before she submerged and another pack member sank her attacker. It is nice to have friends.

Then came a five-day diversion (5-10 November) to Saipan to tie up next to the tender USS Fulton (AS-11), during which Klakring and all of his pack’s skippers would plan their anti-patrol boat sweep between the Bonins and Japan proper. The reason for the sweep was to sterilize the zone ahead of Halsey’s Task Force 38 which was scheduled to raid the Home Islands so that the picket boats couldn’t alert Tokyo of the approaching carriers. However, as Halsey was forced to cancel the raid due to lingering fighting over Leyte at the last minute, the subs were left holding the bag and ran the sweep as more of a dress rehearsal.

Plagued by terrible surface conditions which made torpedo attacks all but useless and gun actions more dangerous to the crews than the enemy, the 15-day/7 submarine sweep only managed to bag just four Japanese pickets as a group (15 November: Silversides sank guard boat Nachiryu Maru No. 12 while Saury bagged the guard boat Kojo Maru. 16 November: Tambor sank Taikai Maru No. 3.).

The fourth came in a surface action on 17 November 1944 Burrfish and Ronquil got in a gunfight with what turned out to be the Japanese auxiliary patrol boat Fusa Maru (177 GRT) south of Hachiro Jima, Japan. In the fight, Burrfish was hit by Japanese gunfire. Two men, Cox. H.A. Foster and S1c R.D. Lopez, were wounded.

It was a close-up affair, with the trawler within 700 yards, and Burrfish received superficial small caliber hits to her after conning tower. Ammunition expended was 9 4-inch (2 Common, 7 HC), 720 rounds of 20mm, and 500 rounds of 30.06 from her M1919s.

Meanwhile, Ronquil also suffered damage from the premature detonation of one of her 40mm Bofors shells which blew two holes in her pressure hull and required a risky topside underway repair (by her XO no less) to be able to dive again.

With Burt’s Brooms disbanded, Burrfish wrapped up her 4th War Patrol at Pearl Harbor on 2 December by tying up alongside USS Pelais, having logged some 15,700 miles across 75 days.

It was at Pearl that LCDR Perkins would depart his submarine, handing command over to LCDR M.H. Lytle, formerly of USS Sturgeon (SS 187) and with eight war patrols to his credit, just before Christmas.

USS Burrfish (SS-312) at Pearl Harbor, circa 1945. Courtesy of H. Leavitt Horton, Sr. NH 92322

Lifeguard Days

Following the Christmas and New Year holidays, Lytle took Burrfish out to sea on 3 January 1945 to begin her 5th War Patrol. She was ordered to take up station south of Japan’s Nanpo Shoto area to serve as a floating lifeguard and weather station to support B-29 raids on the Home Islands. Arriving at the station on the 23rd, she spotted her first incoming “aluminum overcast” wave that afternoon– with her SJ radar set picking up contacts as far off as 34,000 yards.

When USS Pogy (SS 266) and Ronquil entered the area the next day, Lytle, as senior officer afloat, assumed command of the three-boat wolfpack (TG 17.29) and parked astride the Hachija Shima-Chichi Jima shipping lane with the hopes of bagging something between B-29 sorties.

Unfortunately, shipping was slim and the only action Burrfish saw during the patrol was a trio of long-range (15,000 yards) Mark 18 torpedoes sent after a 300-ton Japanese patrol craft on the horizon on 11 February– for which she had to suffer a severe depth charging that required her to put in to Midway for three days of emergency repairs.

Burrfish ended her 5th War Patrol alongside USS Apollo at Guam on 24 February, having covered 8,130 miles in 52 days. ComSubPac did not authorize a Combat Insignia for the patrol.

With repairs pushing back her normal three-week turnaround cycle, Burrfish didn’t begin her 6th War Patrol until 25 March, with orders to patrol the Luzon Strait and off Formosa. A sleeper cruise, her war history notes “Thirty successive days were spent on lifeguard station for the 5th Air Force but no opportunity for rescue presented itself.”

The only “action” seen was in deep-sixing some floating mines and a derelict abandoned 40-foot sampan with her deck guns and in a pre-dawn gunfire raid on the Japanese radio station on Batan Island.

Burrfish ended her 6th war patrol at Saipan on 4 May 1945 after 65 days and 13,600 miles. ComSubPac, in its message not authorizing a Combat Insignia for the patrol, wished “better luck next time” but there would be no next time.

Sent back to her birthplace at Portsmouth Navy Yard at Kittery, Maine for a major overhaul, where she arrived in late June, she was still there when VJ Day hit.

She was decommissioned on 10 October 1946 at Sub Base New London and laid up there as part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.

Burrfish is listed as one of the Balaos in Jane’s 1946 entry.

Burrfish received five battle stars for her World War II service and claimed 13,600 tons across her six (three successful) patrols.

Cold War SSR Days

Recommissioned on 2 November 1948 after just two years in mothballs, she went back home to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for conversion to a Radar Picket Submarine and was redesignated SSR-312 on 27 January 1949.

A total of ten old fleet boats were converted to SSRs under the Migraine I, II & III (SCB-12A) programs.

Burrfish Thames River, circa 1948, on the way to her SSR conversion, via Navsource. Note she has a snorkel and no guns.

Her “Migraine I” conversion included landing her 4-inch gun as well as half of her torpedo tubes and gaining a bunch of radar gear. She retained her open fairwater, with the bridge being shifted to the forward cigarette deck, and a 40 mm Bofors taking the place of her old gun in an instance of one of the final new installations of cannon on an American submarine. Only one other SSR received the Migraine I conversion, the Tench-class boat USS Tigrone (SS-419).

As described by the Submarine Force Library and Museum Association: 

In this modification, the space formerly used as the crew’s mess and galley was turned into a CIC, and the after torpedo tubes were removed to allow the entire after torpedo compartment to be used for berthing. Two of the forward tubes were also eliminated to make additional room for storage and equipment. More importantly, however, the two radar antennas were raised on masts, with an AN/BPS-2 search radar sprouting from the after portion of the sail, and the height finder mounted on a free-standing tower just abaft it. This put the 15-foot search antenna some 40 feet above the water, with the height finder only a little below.

Burrfish returned to duty with the active fleet on 7 February 1950 and was assigned to Submarine Squadron 6 at Norfolk.

Burrfish broadside view during her trials as an SSR, conducted on 27 January 1950, via Navsource

Burrfish as radar picket in Med. Note that her 40mm gun has been removed by this time.

Burrfish as radar picket in Europe, French postcard, 23 May 1952. She still has her Bofors.

Between February 1950 and June 1956, she completed three lengthy deployments with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and “participated in several major type and inter-type exercises and operated along the eastern seaboard as a radar picket ship.” During this time she also earned an Occupation Clasp for service in the Med (29 Sep 50 – 23 Jan 51).

As part of SubDiv 62, all of the Atlantic-based radar pickets were collected including Burrfish’ old “Burt’s Brooms” buddy, Requin, two Migraine II conversions: Burrfish (SSR-312) and Tigrone (SSR-419), and the Migrane IIIs Pompon (SSR-267), Ray (SS-271), and Redfin (SSR-272) along with Sailfish. 

USS Yellowstone (AD-27) in Augusta Bay, Sicily, during her Mediterranean cruise, May- October 1950. Alongside her are (l-r): USS Sea Robin (SS-407); USS Torsk ( SS-423); USS Sea Leopard (SS-483); USS Burrfish (SSR-312); USS John R. Pierce (DD-753); USS Barton (DD-722); USS Shea (DM-30). In the background is the USS Harry F. Bauer (DM-26). 80-G-428712

On 5 June 1956, with the SSR program winding down and new SSNs arriving in the fleet, Burrfish sailed from Norfolk to New London where she reported for inactivation.

She was placed out of commission, in reserve, on 17 December 1956.

Canadian Service

As we have covered prior, the Royal Canadian Navy had a series of fits and starts that included a pair of small (144-foot, 300-ton) American-built coastal boats, HMCS CC-1 and CC-2, which served in the Great War, another pair of American-made 435-ton H-class submarines (HMCS CH-14 and CH-15) which served briefly in the 1920s, and two ex-Kriegsmarine U-boats (HMCS U-190 and U-889) which served (or at least floated) for a couple years after WWII.

Looking to regrow their nascent submarine arm in 1960 after a 13-year break, the RCN inspected 10 American mothballed diesel boats and picked Burrfish with an initial five-year loan and the agreement that Ottawa would pay for the cost of reactivation and modification. It made sense as Burrfish had only been laid up at this point for three years and had already received both a snorkel and improved higher-capacity batteries in her 1949 SSR conversion.

The mission set for the new boat was to be one of an OPFOR for Canada’s very professional ASW force, with the RCN noting, “During and after the war it had been the custom of the RN to provide ‘tame’ submarines for anti-submarine training in Nova Scotia waters. By 1961, with a growing fleet of new anti-submarine ships based at Esquimalt, it had become desirable to have a submarine stationed there as well.”

She received the name HMCS Grilse (S 71) after a Great War era yacht turned fast torpedo boat and was commissioned into the RCN on 11 May 1961. Notably, while the Canadians had run six different subs prior, Grilse was the first to have an actual name rather than just a number. 

HMCS Grilse. Note her “clean” appearance with SSR radars removed and no mounted guns.

H.M.C.S. Grilse – Esquimalt,BC – Aug. 22, 1966

HMCS Grilse

HMCS Grilse

HMCS Grilse

USS Burrfish SS-312 (Balao class) was loaned to Canada and commissioned as HMCS Grilse (71) on May 11th, 1961, seen here at Esquimalt with RCN WWII submarine vets aboard for a tour. Note the details of her snorkel and radar arrangement.

Keeping her slightly longer than her five-year loan, Grilse was withdrawn in December 1968, returned to U.S. Navy custody at Bremerton, and was struck from the Naval Register on 19 July 1969.

Grilse proved such a good investment for the Canadians that they sought to purchase four new Barbel-class diesel boats from the U.S., giving them two boats each at Halifax and Esquimalt, but the ever-thrifty government instead opted for a trio of British Oberon-class boats ordered from HM Royal Dockyard Chatham. These three, HMCS Ojibwa (SS 72), Onondaga (SS 73), and Okanagan (SS 74), entered Canadian service between 1965 and 1968.

On 2 December 1968, the mothballed USS Argonaut (SS 475) was sold to the RCN for $150,000 and renamed HMCS Rainbow (SS 75), named after one of the first ships ever to enter service with the Canadians back in 1910, giving the Canadian a solid four boats until 1975 when the old Tench-class fleet boat was retired, opting for an all-Oberon force until 2000.

On 19 November 1969, ex-Burrfish/Grilse was expended in a SINKEX, destroyed on the surface while under remote control by the brand new Mk 46 ASW torpedo dropped by a SH-3 Sea King helicopter off San Clemente Island in an early test of that weapon system.

November 19, 1969: HMCS Grilse submarine was sunk by USN off California

Epilogue

Neither the Americans nor the Canadians have used the names Burrfish or Grilse since our SS/SSR-312/S-71 was disposed of.

Her bell, marked Burrfish on one side and Grisle on the other, is on display at CFB Esquimalt.

Burrfish’s war history, plans, deck logs, and patrol reports are in the National Archives.

Her Canadian vets have a For Postery’s Sake page for Grilse’s Cold War service.

Six Balao-class submarines are preserved (for now) as museum ships across the country.

Please visit one of these fine ships and keep the legacy alive:

-USS Batfish (SS-310) at War Memorial Park in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
–USS Becuna (SS-319) at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
–USS Bowfin (SS-287) at USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park in Honolulu, Hawaii.
–USS Lionfish (SS-298) at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts.
– USS Pampanito (SS-383) at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in San Francisco, California, (which played the part of the fictional USS Stingray in the movie Down Periscope).
–USS Razorback (SS-394) at Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum in North Little Rock, Arkansas.

The three UDT swimmers left behind at Palau– Specialist First Class (Athletic Instructor) John Churchill MacMahon, Quartermaster First Class Robert A. Black Jr., and Chief Gunner’s Mate (Aviation) Howard Livingston Roeder, are among the 72,040 unaccounted for U.S. military personnel from WWII as tracked by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. They were memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines and at the UDT/SEAL Memorial Wall at Fort Pierce. The search for their remains continues, with their cases marked in the DPAA category of “Active Pursuit.”

Recent expeditions to Palau to help find more information about the trio were mounted by Project Recover in conjunction with the National Navy UDT -SEAL Museum. The case is personal for the Naval Special Warfare community, as it is the only combat mission ever accomplished by NSW operators where men were lost in action and their remains never recovered.

As for the rest of UDT-10, it went on to see much action in at Anguar Island, Palau, and in the Philippines before it was disestablished at Fort Pierce on 2 February 1946. It was not one of the four (UDT-11 and 12 at Coronado, 21 and 22 at Little Creek) downsized teams formed for post-war service. It was never stood back up.

Burrfish’s plank owner skipper, William Beckwith Perkins, who commanded her on her first four war patrols, and who was at her combat periscope when she sank the tanker Rossbach and fought off Fusa Maru, remained in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral in 1959 after 26 years of service. Of the 465 American submarine skippers who pulled at least one war patrol, only about 60 ever managed to earn a star in the promotion-slim postwar sub force (a club he shared with Burrfish’s first XO, Talbot Harper).

Perkins passed in 1992, age 81, at Fork Union, Virginia, and is remembered as a distinguished alumni of the Fort Union Military Academy and Annapolis.

His son, who inherited his papers, has been influential in documenting the loss of the UDT men at Gagil Tomil.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 15, 2024: One Tired Hound

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 15, 2024: One Tired Hound

Library and Archives Canada MIKAN 3374382

Above we see Able Seaman Carl Carlson of the F (River) Class destroyer HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69) on 16 August 1944 mugging with one of the bulkheads of his ship that had been neatly peeled open by an enemy 88mm shell during an action against three German VP boats off Brest the month prior. The plucky tin can gave as good as she got and left her assailant at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay before she headed back across the channel.

The well-traveled Qu’Appelle had inflicted worse on the Kriegsmarine earlier in the war– but that was when she was known by a different name.

The E&F’s

Moving on from their Great War-era tin cans, the Admiralty ordered a pair of modern destroyer prototypes in 1927– HMS Amazon (1,352 tons, £319, 455) and Ambuscade (1,173 tons, £326,616), each capable of making 37 knots on superheated oil-fired steam turbine plants and armed with four old-style BL 4.7″/45 Mk I dual purpose guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes.

The 1927 program destroyer type, of which the Royal Navy would keep in production into 1940. M0064

Further, these ships were super modern for their time and were among the first built with all-steel (rather than fabric) bridges, had a higher freeboard and improved cabin accommodations, and a larger radius of action than preceding classes. Moreover, induced ventilation could be supplied throughout the vessel, for service in the Tropics.

With a little tweak to include more torpedo tubes and newer 4.7″ guns, these became the circa 1928-29 Programme 20-ship A&B class (1,350 tons std, 328 feet oal, 35 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), so referenced as the ships generally used names that started with As and Bs. Every 10th ship was built as a slightly larger flotilla leader with space for a commodore and staff.

This quickly followed with the minimally improved 14-ship (including two flotilla leaders) circa 1929–1931 Programme C&D class (1,375 tons std, 329 feet oal, 36 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges).

This naturally led to the 18-ship (including two flotilla leaders) circa 1931-32 Programme E&F class (1,405 tons std, 329 feet oal, 35.5 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), which, as Worth describes, “closely resembles the D class with increased subdivision.” In short, they had an improved hull form over the preceding C&Ds and had three boiler rooms instead of two as well as other minor updates.

The RN similarly kept this incrementally improved line going with the 24-ship (including two leaders) circa 1934-35 Programme G&H class (1,370 tons std, 323 feet oal, 35.5 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), which is beyond the scope of this post, but you can easily see the lineage of these 78 closely related interwar produced British destroyers

The E flight (Echo, Eclipse, Electra, Encounter, Escapade, Escort, Esk, Express, and flotilla leader Exmouth) and F flight (Fame, Fearless, Firedrake, Foresight, Forester, Fortune, Foxhound, Fury, and flotilla leader Faulknor) were constructed in just 26 months between March 1933 and June 1935 because contracts were placed at 10 different yards simultaneously — HM Dockyard Portsmouth, Wm Denny, Hawthorn & Leslie, Scotts, Swan Hunter, Yarrow, Parsons, Cammell Laird, J. Samuel White, and John Brown.

With a full load that approached 2,000 tons in wartime, like the rest of the A&B, C&D, and follow-on G&Hs, the E&F’s main battery was four 4.7″/45 (12 cm) Mark IX guns, arranged curiously to where they could only elevate some 40 degrees, which gave them poor AAA performance.

HMS Foxhound off Freetown, Sierra Leone in August 1943. One of the many British destroyers built during the 1930s with 4.7″/45 (12 cm) Mark IX guns. These are CPXVII mountings which allow elevations of +40 degrees. IWM Photograph A 18772.

Anti-ship punch was in the form of two quadruple 21-inch torpedo tubes on amidships turnstiles, with no reloads. The standard torpedo across all of these destroyer classes was the Mark IX, which was designed in 1928 and introduced in 1930. It carried a 750-pound warhead to 10,500 yards at 36 knots. By 1939, the updated Mark IX** which had a larger 805-pound Torpex warhead and a 15,000-yard range was the standard.

HMS Foxhound’s torpedo crew practice with fish in the tubes. In charge (in white shirt) is the Torpedo gunner. Note the Carley float and water jar lashed to the tubes to save space in the destroyer. IWM (A 18779)

Rounding out the armament for the class were two quad Vickers .50 cals (subsequently added to after 1940), two depth charge throwers, depth charge racks for 20 ash cans, and mechanical minesweeping gear. Importantly, they left the builder’s yards with a Type 121 sonar, a good set with a range of some 2,500 yards, installed.

Meet Foxhound

Our subject was the sixth in Royal Navy service to carry the “Foxhound” moniker going back to an 18-gun Cruizer-class brig-sloop during the Napoleonic Wars. As apt for the name of the small and fast English hunting dog, the Admiralty reissued the name several times in the 19th Century to swift little warships. This legacy gave her two existing battle honors (Basque Roads 1809, Dardanelles 1916) to carry forward.

The fourth and fifth HMS Foxhound, respectively, a 125-foot Forester-class 4-gun screw gunboat launched that served from 1877 through 1897 (but endured in the commercial trade on the Thames until 1975!); and a Beagle class destroyer (H16) that served in the Dardanelles with distinction during the Great War and was sold to the breakers in 1921. (IWM Q 40750 & RMG collection)

HMS Foxhound (H69) was constructed alongside sister HMS Fortune (H70) at John Brown, Clydebank, and, unlike the rest of their sisters, this pair received Brown-Curtis geared steam turbines rather than the more standard Parsons sets for no downgrade in speed (36 knots), performance (36,000shp), or range (6350nm at 15 on 471 tons of fuel oil).

Foxhound was commissioned on 6 June 1935 after a 22-month construction period, just five weeks off from her John Brown-made sister Fortune.

She was sleek and beautiful.

Foxhound H69, prewar Valentine Postcard

Foxhound, pre-war, with her glad rags flying.

Another nice prewar view of Foxhound

With the Es assigned to the Home Fleet’s 5th Destroyer Flotilla while the new Fs made up the 6th DF, Foxhound, and her sisters saw service in the tense period just before WWII, including flotilla-sized cruises to the Red Sea– where the Royal Navy was keeping tabs on the Italian invasion/occupation of Ethiopia–and off Spain where the Civil War was raging.

The Royal Navy at Gibraltar, 1938. Including elements of the Mediterranean Fleet (light grey) and the Home Fleet (dark grey). In addition to the 6 battleships (HMS Nelson, Rodney, Warspite, Malaya plus two R-class), 2 battlecruisers (Hood and Repulse), 2 carriers (Glorious and Furious), and 11 cruisers, whole flotillas of destroyers can be seen including our own Foxhound, to the right, and her shipyard twin sister Fortune, to the left. (click to big up) 5495×1295

War!

Just five months before the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Es in the 5th DF and the Fs in the 6th DF were changed on paper to the 7th and 8th Flotillas respectively.

Our destroyer was in the group that sank the first of 1,162 German U-boats sent to the bottom in the war, just a fortnight after Hitler sent his troops into Poland.

Operating as a screen for the carrier HMS Ark Royal (91), Foxhound along with sisters HMS Faulknor and Firedrake, sent the Type IX U-boat U-39 (Kptlt. Gerhard Glattes) to the bottom on 14 September 1939 west of the Hebrides. In a case rare for what was to come, Glattes and all 43 of U-39’s crew survived the encounter and were among the first German POWs in England.

A beam view of HMS Foxhound with her war paint on. IWM (A 18777)

Foxhound soon became very well-traveled.

Besides 14 convoy runs between the time she joined Halfax-to Clyde TC 01 in December 1939 and left MKF 022 in September 1943, including the vital Suez to Sydney Pamphlet convoy in February 1943 that carried 30,000 Australian troops back home from Egypt once the Japanese entered the war, our little destroyer seemed to be everywhere.

Foxhound H69

She was in Norway, harassing German shipping early in the war in Operation SK and looking for the seized American merchant vessel SS City of Flint (which a German prize crew from the pocket battleship Deutschland sailed to then-neutral Murmansk).

Masthead look-out of HMS Foxhound goes aloft in sou’wester and oilskin. IWM (A 18778)

She was with the force, centered around HMS Rodney, that chased the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst in February 1940. Later that year, in December, she would search for the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. She was also in the great Hunt for the Bismarck in May 1941, screening the carrier HMS Ark Royal.

She took part in Operation Du, a cruiser-destroyer anti-shipping raid into the Skagerrak in which Foxhound chased down several vessels– which all turned out to belong to neutrals.

Foxhound underway IWM FL 13264

Foxhound returned to Norway in early April 1940, where on the 13th she took part in the second Battle of Narvik where nine British destroyers, supported by Swordfish from the aircraft carrier HMS Furious and the offshore guns of the battleship Warspite, ended the Kriegsmarine’s plans for U-64 (the first sunk by aircraft), and eight desperately needed German destroyers, all of which were sunk or scuttled by the end of the day.

Foxhound rescued 11 survivors of the destroyer Erich Giese Z12 from the freezing water that day but two would succumb to their injuries.

Kriegsmarine Zerstörer Z19 Hermann Künne on fire in Trollvika, 13. April 1940

Burning wreck of the destroyer Erich Giese (Z12) 13. April 1940

In June 1940, with the fall of France imminent, Foxhound found herself in Gibraltar as an escort for Ark Royal and battlecruiser HMS Hood. On 26 June, the carrier, battlecruiser, and their hounds were sent towards the Canaries looking for the curiously missing French battlewagon Richelieu, which eventually made for Dakar in the French West African colony of Senegal.

With relations deteriorating with the now kind-of-out-of-the-war French, Foxhound soon found herself with VADM Somerville’s strong Force H off the French Force de Raid’s Algerian anchorage at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 (Operation Catapult).

In this, Foxhound, with Capt. C.S. Holland, of the Ark Royal (formerly Naval Attaché at Paris) along with two other officers recently employed as liaisons with the French fleet, was detailed to sail forward and parley with VADM Marcel-Bruno Gensoul. When negotiations fell through, Somerville ordered the shameful bombardment of the anchored French ships, a one-sided gunfight that left 1,300 French sailors dead. Sadly, Foxhound was close enough to see it all– observers in her motorboat recorded the fall of shell– although she suffered no damage.

French battleship Bretagne, on fire and visibly low by the stern, at Mers-el-Kébir, 3 July 1940

She continued to fight against the Vichy with Operation Ration in which Foxhound and four other destroyers intercepted the Casablanca-to-Oran French convoy K 5 in 30 December 1940. They seized the cargo liner Chantilly (9986 GRT), tanker Octane (2034 GRT), and freighters Suroit (554 GRT) and Sally Maersk (3252 GRT), sailing with them back to Gibraltar. K5’s sole escort, the armed trawler La Touilonnaise (425 GRT) offered no resistance and was allowed to continue to North Africa, sans convoy.

Foxhound sailed on several Malta relief missions (Operations Hurry and Operation White in 1940, Operations Splice, Tracer, Railway, and Rocket in 1941), escorting carriers bringing Hurricane fighters and Skua bombers to the embattled island as well as other runs in the Med.

For help fighting off Italian and German bombers, Foxhound and almost all of her remaining sisters had four Oerlikon and a 3-inch/45 QF Mk I AAA installed in place of their quad Vickers .50 mount and one set of torpedo tubes. They also picked up Type 271 Air Search and Type 286/M/P radars.

In February 1941, she helped screen the battlewagons HMS Renown and Malaya, along with the cruiser HMS Sheffield, during Operation Grog, the bombardment of Genoa that left four Italian cargo ships sunk in the harbor.

On 18 June 1941, Foxhound, along with sisters HMS Faulknor, Fearless, Forester, and Foresight, bagged her second U-boat of the war, Oblt. Franz Gramitzky’s Type IID U-138, which was sunk just west of Gibraltar off Cadiz, Spain. Like U-39 prior, Gramitzky and all his crew were saved by the British destroyers, then dutifully interrogated and placed in a POW camp for the duration.

By March 1942, Foxhound was assigned to the Eastern Fleet operating in the Indian Ocean to blunt the sortie of the 1st Japanese Carrier Fleet. She would remain in the region for over a year, operating from Colombo to Durban to Bombay to Aden on convoy support missions, adding such exotic ports as Kilindini, Diego Suarez, and Mombasa to that list.

Foxhound H69 IWM A 18776

Recalled to the Atlantic in May 1943, she sailed back home by working slow long-range convoys as part of West Africa Command to Freetown and Gibraltar, finally arriving at Rosyth three months later.

Foxhound, LAC 3199021

She then put into Humber for a refit as an anti-submarine escort destroyer that would see one of her 4.7-inch guns landed to make room for a 24-cell Hedgehog ASW RL device, two more K-gun depth charge throwers, and another 70 depth charges (for a total of 125!). She was also to receive a Type 291 air-warning radar and an American SG-1 surface-search radar, along with a Type 144 sonar.

By August 1943, Foxhound had tallied some 240,000nm since the beginning of the war, ranging from the Bay of Bengal to Iceland and back. This brought an Admiralty photographer to the ship at Sheerness to document the “fine fighting record” of this hardy little vessel and her U-boat-busting crew.

The Quartermaster sounding “eight bells” on the Foxhound’s bell while at Sheerness. Note the Fox’s brush hanging from the clapper. It was presented by one of her officers. August 1943 IWM A 18775

An officer of HMS Foxhound, a South African, watching a British port come into sight as the destroyer completed her 240,000 miles of record steaming. IWM (A 18774)

While in British service, our little hound earned five battle honors (Atlantic 1939-41, Narvik 1940, Norway 1940, Malta Convoys 1941, and Mediterranean 1941).

Canadian Service

To help make good on the loss of the Canadian destroyers HMCS Fraser (H48), Margaree (H49), and Ottawa (H60) earlier in the war, the Admiralty decided in the summer of 1943 to transfer three (very well-used) E&Fs.

These ships included HMS Express (H61) and the shipyard sisters Fortune and Foxhound. The trio, in line with Canadian naming conventions, took on North American river names and became, respectively,  HMCS Gatineau, HMCS Saskatchewan, and Qu’Appelle while retaining the same pennant/hull numbers.

HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69), fresh from her refit, was commissioned in the RCN on 8 February 1944.

HMCS Qu’Appelle, 1944, with her new Western Approaches style camo scheme. LAC 3921890

Soon after she was assigned to Escort Group 12, which was forming up in the Channel ports for the planned Overlord/Neptune invasion of Normandy in June. Foxhound spent the next three months in a series of ASW exercises off Tobermoy and Lough Foyle.

EG 11 and EG 12 were “all Canadian” in makeup and would patrol off Falmouth and Lands End to the deep water curve off the Brittany Coast on D-Day and immediately after.

While supporting the landings on D+2, on 08 June 1944, Qu’Appelle was reportedly attacked Gnats from U-953 (Oblt Karl-Heinz Marbach) with the acoustic torpedoes exploding in the ship’s wake leaving with no damage to the destroyer.

U-953 and a second German boat stalked EG 12 ruthlessly but without joy due to defective torpedoes, as detailed in Normandy 1944: The Canadian Summer: 

Lieutenant Commander Alan Easton RCNR, the commanding officer of EG-12’s HMCS Saskatchewan [ex-HMS Fortune] recalled in his memoir, 50 North, that the evening of 7 June was like a “summer excursion” as the group patrolled northeast of Ushant: The four of us were gliding along in line abreast, listening for the sound of U-boats beneath the quiet sea. It was like drawing a net through the water, stretched tightly between the ships, so that it would snag the big fish while letting through the small unwanted ones. But the net did not always hang down as it should temperature gradients sometimes interfered with it.

In the late evening, however, “a low rumble was heard, the unmistakable sound of an underwater explosion.” Presuming it to be a torpedo hitting the bottom or exploding prematurely, EG-12 searched but saw or heard nothing else. An hour later a violent blast shook Saskatchewan, and 70 meters off the ship’s port quarter “a solid column of water shot a hundred feet in the air “when a torpedo exploded just before reaching the destroyer.

By the grace of “a miracle,” in Easton’s words, “this fast-moving, fish-like machine had self-triggered when only four seconds short of wreaking havoc in the bowels of its target.” As the destroyers continued to hunt through the night and the following morning, two other torpedoes exploded close by while another narrowly missed Skeena.

Easton described his frustration:

Where was the enemy who was so persistently endeavoring to sink us? Where were the other U-boats? We had not the slightest idea except that we knew the one who attacked us was probably within a mile or so. The ASDIC could pick up nothing except useless echoes. It was extremely aggravating.

On D+12, Foxhound, with sister Fortune/Saskatchewan and fellow Canuk tin cans HMCS Restigouche and HMCS Skeena, escorted the battleship HMS Anson from Scapa Flow to Plymouth, the latter on her first leg to head to the Pacific.

By July, the primary Kriegsmarine assets in the Bay of Biscay were 50~ Vorpostenboote (Outpost Boats) of 7. Vorpostenflotille, armed trawlers typically equipped with an 8.8cm Flak or two as well as some smaller guns and some primitive chain-based minesweeping gear. They screened the remaining U-boats in Brest whenever they came and went.

Your typical Vorpostenboot, of which the Germans fielded hundreds. Bild 27479778312

Foxhound and her three fellow Canuk DDs, as part of Operation Dredger in the Bay of Biscay off the Pierres Noires lighthouse on the night of 5/6 July, scrapped it out with three German VP-boats that were trying to escort U-741 out to sea. The running battle left V 715 (Alfred I) sunk and V 721 (Neubau 308) crippled and beached. U-741 would be chased down and sunk by British destroyers a month later. Both Saskatchewan and Qu’Appelle caught hits from the VP boats but suffered no casualties. Radar-equipped destroyers vs armed trawlers is almost a predetermined outcome.

By late July, Qu’Appelle was assigned to Operation Kinetic, a plan to ramp up the blockade of the Bay of Biscay by ending the semi-regular German coastal convoys off the west coast of Brittany between Brest and La Rochelle.

As part of Kinetic, on the night of 10/11 August 1944, Qu’appelle, along with Skeena, Restigouche, and HMCS Assiniboine, dismantled a German convoy in Audierne Bay near Brest. Those sunk included the Vorpostenboot V-720 (Neubau 720/307) while two trawlers were forced ashore by a burning farmhouse and the ersatz minesweeper Sperrbrecher 157 (1,425 tons) limped off only to be sunk three days later by the light cruiser HMS Mauritius. However, in the confusion of the running night surface action fought in shallow waters at close range, Skeena’s bow collided with Qu’Appelle’s stern as the Canadian destroyers retired.

This photograph shows the damage to the destroyer HMCS Qu’appelle after a collision with HMCS Skeena during a night-time battle off the French coast. Sailors, including one standing within the ship’s hull (lower right), examine the damage. George Metcalf Archival Collection. CWM 19830436-011

Personnel examining the damaged tiller flat of HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69), England, 16 August 1944 LAC 3596854

Following repair, Foxhound arrived “home” in Canada for the first time on 29 November 1944 when she arrived at Halifax. Sent to Pictou for refit in preparation for service in the Far East, she emerged again on 31 March 1945.

Rather than ship out for the Pacific, Qu’Appelle served as a troop transport on four trips between Greenock and Halifax, bringing Canadian forces back from Europe, and, post-VJ-Day, was paid off on 11 October 1945.

By the 1946 Jane’s, Saskatchewan/Fortune had already been disposed of and the E&Fs in RCN service were listed as the “Gatineau class.”

Qu’Appelle lingered around for another at the Torpedo School at Halifax, serving as a stationary training ship and sometimes tender to Canada’s two captured German Type IXC/40 U-boats, HCMS U-190 and U-889. 

Broadside view of the snow-dusted HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69) 28 February 1947, likely with HMCS U-190 alongside. In October 1947, the Canadian Navy sank U-190 as a target during Operation Scuttled, a live-fire naval exercise off Halifax. LAC 3209066

Added to the disposal list on 12 Jul 1947, Qu’Appelle was sold later that year for breaking up at Sydney, NS.

HMCS Qu’Appelle earned three battle honors (Atlantic 1944, Normandy 1944, and Biscay 1944) while in Canadian service, adding to her five battle honors earned with the RN earlier in the war.

Epilogue

Some relics of Qu’Appelle endure in Canada, including her 1944 marked bell that she carried off Normandy and in the Biscay blockade. It is preserved at the CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum.

While she has “Qu’Appelle” on the front, it is the destroyer’s original bell, and still says “Foxhound 1935” on the reverse side.

Her RCN service is commemorated in an excellent For Posterty’s Sake page.

Speaking of which, the Canadians recycled her name for a Cold War-era Mackenzie-class destroyer escort (DDE 264) who, in a salute to the old Foxhound, carried an insignia and logo was the head of a fox. She also utilized the old WWII H69’s bell.

HMCS Qu’Appelle (DDE 264) was in service with the RCN from 1963 until 1992, almost all of it in the Pacific.

After DDE-264 was gone, the name was used for the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets Summer Training Centre and is still retained by the Cadet’s Manitoba division as the Qu’Appelle River meets the Assiniboine River in Manitoba.

Of Foxhound/Qu’Appelle’s 17 E&F class sisters, ten were lost during the war: Exmouth, Eclipse, Electra, Encounter, Escort, Esk, Fearless, Firedrake, Foresight, and Fury, with the Germans, Italians, and Japanese all accounting for the job. Post-war, besides the three sent to Canada, Fame was sold to the Dominican Republic, and Echo was loaned to Greece. All in Commonwealth service were scrapped by 1947 while the Greek and Dominican sisters endured until 1956 and 1968 when their runs were terminated.

Korvettenkapitän Gerhard Glattes, the skipper of U-39 which Foxhound and company bagged in September 1939, spent more than seven and a half years as a POW, only being released in April 1947. His stint was the second longest imprisonment of any U-boat commander, beaten only (by one day) by Kptlt. Günther Lorentz of U-63 (Busch and Röll, 1999). The three torpedoes Glattes fired at Ark Royal— which had no hits– were his only shots of the war. Glattes returned to a very different Germany and passed in 1986, aged 77. He had been preceded in death by U-138’s Kptlt. Gramitzky, who only served five years as a POW passed in Germany in 1978.

Meanwhile, the destroyer Z12 Eric Giese is a popular dive spot in Narvik. 

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024: Oft Overlooked Essex

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024: Oft Overlooked Essex

U.S. Navy photo 80-G-282724 in the National Archives, Identifier: 276538368

Above we see the brand new Essex-class fleet carrier USS Bennington (CV-20), decked out in Measure 32, Design 17A camouflage, photographed in the busy shipping lanes off New York on 25 September 1944 by Navy Blimp ZP-12 with the troopship SS Nievw Amsterdam in the foreground. She would go on to become one of the last of her class in Navy custody but first had to earn battle stars off Japan and Vietnam as well as pluck a space capsule from the sea.

Meet Bennington

One of eighteen Essex-class carriers completed during World War II, CV-20 was the second U.S. Navy warship named after the little-known 1777 New York battle during the Saratoga campaign that occurred near the Vermont city of Bennington.

The first USS Bennington (Gunboat No. 4) was a hardy little vessel probably best known to history for taking formal possession of Wake Island for the United States in 1899.

(Gunboat # 4) Dressed with flags in a harbor, probably while serving with the Squadron of Evolution, circa 1891-1892. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1969. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 67551

Ordered a week after Pearl Harbor on 15 December 1941, our second USS Bennington was the first of her class built in the Empire State (which makes her name choice logical) and was laid down on 15 December 1942 at the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard.

Bennington was also the first American fleet carrier constructed wholly in a dry dock, rather than on a builder’s ways, and at her launching on 26 February 1944, the dock gates were opened to allow the Hudson to flow in. She was sponsored by the wife of eight-time U.S. Rep. Melvin Maas (R-Minn) who, a Great War Marine aviator, was back in uniform as a colonel on MacArthur’s staff.

Bennington being prepared for launching in a building dock at the New York Navy Yard, 23 February 1944. She was christened three days later. Courtesy of Mr. James Russell, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, 1972. NH 75631

USS Bennington (CV-20) being floated out of drydock at the New York Navy Yard, on 26 February 1944, following her christening. NH 75632

The same yard was soon turning the lessons learned in constructing CV-20 to good use and would build three sisters (Bon Homme Richard, Kearsarge, and Oriskany) while a fourth, USS Reprisal (CV 35) was canceled just after launch.

Bennington was one of the last of the “short bow” designed Essex class carriers completed, with later vessels having a longer clipper bow. Remember this in a minute.

Starting in May 1944, her crew gathered at Naval Training Station Newport and Brooklyn Navy Yard for pre-commissioning training while her inaugural carrier group, the brand new CVG 82, was likewise coming together at the fields around Norfolk.

She was commissioned on 6 August 1944– 80 years ago this week– and her plankowners and baby Airedales boarded her for the first time in front of a crowd of 8,000 people. Her first skipper, T/Capt. James Bennett Sykes (USNA 1919), came from the captain’s cabin of the very successful U-boat-busing USS Card (CVE-11) whose embarked VC-9 squadron bagged an incredible eight boats between August and October 1943.

Her wardroom also included 32-year-old LT John Aloysius “Buddy” Hassett, formerly a first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Boston Bees/Braves, and New York Yankees. He naturally pulled down the collateral duty of Bennington’s athletic and recreation director and coach of the carrier’s baseball team and would remain with the vessel until the end of the war.

Hassett would leave the Navy in November 1945 as an LCDR.

CVG-82 was made up of the “Fighting Fools” of VF-82 (36 F6F-5 Hellcats), VB-82 (15 SB2C-4E Helldivers) and VT-82 (15 TBM-3 Avengers). This would be beefed up by two Marine Corsair squadrons, VMF-112 and VMF-223, with a total of 36 F4U-1Ds and 54 flying leatherneck pilots. Likewise, a night fighter det of six radar-equipped F6F-5N, six pilots, two ground officers, and seven enlisted ground crew joined VF-82 at the same time, landing six of the more standard Hellcats to make room.

Thus equipped, CVG-82 sailed for the Pacific in January 1945 with a very fighter-heavy 73 F models, 15 dive bombers, and 15 torpedo bombers, as opposed to the more traditional “Sunday Punch” of 36-36-36 of each type. This was to counter the onset of the kamikaze waves, which started in October 1944, and the general decline of floating and ashore targets on which to expend torpedoes and bombs.

By this point in the Pacific campaign, close-in air support had largely been passed from fast carriers to the Navy’s growing force of CVEs and CVLs, with the CVs tasked instead with providing a robust fighter umbrella over the fleet.

USS Bennington (CV-20) photographed from a plane that has just taken off from her flight deck, during the ship’s shakedown period, 20 October 1944. 80-G-289645

USS Bennington (CV-20) at anchor in Gravesend Bay, New York, 13 Dec 1944

USS Bennington (CV-20) ferries aircraft to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii while on her maiden voyage to fight in World War II in January 1945

War!

Steaming through the Panama Canal and calling at San Diego and Pearl Harbor on her way to Ulithi Atoll Fleet Anchorage by 7 February 1945, CVG-82 managed to chalk up 3,000 landings along the way, although crack ups were to be expected.

Firefighters battle flames engulfing a Marine F4U Corsair after a crash on the flight deck of the carrier Bennington (CV 20) on 14 February 1945. According to Bennington’s War Diary, the plane was of Marine 38, which crashed into the island and “created a stubborn gasoline fire” until it was jettisoned over the side. Its pilot, 2LT W.M. Browning, USMCR, escaped with “minor lacerations.” NNAM photo.

Underway as part of TG 58.1, Bennington/CVG-82’s baptism of fire came on 16 February when she took part in the first large-scale Navy air raids of the Japanese home islands, sending 130 combat sorties in “two deck load strikes” into the area around Tokyo Bay, flying missions against installations at Mitsune and Mikatagahara Airfields on Hachijo Jima, Nanpo Shoto. During the raid, she was the Westernmost carrier– the one closest to Japan.

At the end of the day, 10 aircrew were listed missing. They would not be the last.

From her War Diary for 16 Feb 1945:

She then pivoted south to support the Iwo Jima landings, plastering Chichi Jima on 18 February (D-1). Then came a four-month cycle that saw Bennington pivoting back and forth between supporting landings and operations on/over Iwo and Okinawa and Home Island raids.

This would include joining in, with air groups from 14 other carriers, on the 7 April hammering of the world’s largest battleship, Yamato (with Admiral Seiichi Itō on board), the light cruiser Yahagi, and four of the Emperor’s destroyers into the East China Sea.

Note Bennington’s hits

U.S. Navy deck crewmen aboard USS Bennington (CV-20) maneuver a Curtiss SB2C-4 Helldiver of bombing squadron VB-82 into position on the carrier’s flight deck. VB-82 operated from Bennington during the period February to June 1945. Note Bennington’s arrowhead geometric air group identification symbol on the SB2C’s wings and tail. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.357

Bennington launching TBM Avengers from VT-1 during operations in early 1945. USS Harrison (DD-573), a Fletcher-class destroyer that received 11 battle stars for World War II service, steams past in the background. She would later serve in the Mexican Navy as Cuauhtemoc (E-01) until 1982. 80-G-K-5103

Japanese plane being shot down by gunfire on 14 May 1945 while approaching USS Bennington (CV 20). Image taken from USS Hornet (CV 12). The ships were serving as part of Task Force 38 off the Kyushu, Japan area. Sky is decorated with anti-aircraft fire. 80-G-331622

USS Bennington (CV-20) Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat fighters of VF-82 prepare for takeoff, circa May 1945. 80-G-K-4946

This high tempo continued until 5 June 1945 when Connie, a “small and tight typhoon overtook TG 38.1, which passed through the eye of the storm at 0700 that morning,” hitting the group with winds clocked at over 100 knots and seas of up to 50 feet. The storm damaged almost every ship in the TG and wrecked or washed away 76 aircraft from the group’s three assembled carriers.

Bennington got some of the worst of it, having her forecastle deck flooded, leaving living spaces a “shambles,” buckling a 25-foot section of her flight deck, and putting both catapults out of commission. Hornet, operating in TG.38.1 along with Bennington, suffered almost the exact same damage.

Nonetheless, she was still capable of putting up strikes– sending 26 Hellcats and 11 Corsairs to bomb and strafe Japanese airfields on Southern Kyushu on 8 June– and mount a CAP over her task group.

Bennington was forced to retire to Leyte Gulf off Tacloban Field where she underwent 20 days of emergency repairs courtesy of the forward-deployed repair ship USS Ajax (AR-6), which cut away her collapsed flight deck.

Workers from the floating workshop USS Ajax, (AR-6) repaired the bow of the carrier USS Bennington, (CV-20) off Leyte Island in June 1945. Virgil Cowart Collection. UA 539.11

CVG-82 made their 10,744th and final landing on Bennington on 10 June. In their four months in combat on CV-20, they had an impressive tally that included helping to break the back of the Imperial Air Force– claiming 386 Japanese aircraft destroyed in the air or on the ground– as well as contributing to ending the last surface threat of the Imperial Navy.

In return, CVG-82 lost an incredible 127 aircraft (remember that they sailed from California in January 1945 with 103!) along with 53 aviators and aircrew, a quarter of their complement, across 7,304 combat sorties.

Bled white in terms of both men and material, CVG-82 was pulled off Bennington on 17 June and sent back to the states on the homeward-bound jeep carrier USS White Plains (CVE-66). They would not be ready to deploy again until October 1946, when they shipped out on a Med cruise aboard Bennington’s sister, USS Randolph (CV-15).

CVG-82s scorecard from their 1945 cruise with Bennington:

Likewise leaving Bennington at this time was Capt. Sykes who was sent to take command of the Naval Ordnance Test Station (later NAWS China Lake) at Inyokern, California. His place was taken by Capt. Boynton Lewis Braun (USNA 1921B), a career naval aviator who earned his wings on the old USS Lexington and had formerly commanded the escort carrier USS Manila Bay (CVE-61).

With CVG-82 gone, Bennington soon picked up the recently reorganized Carrier Air Group One (CVG-1) which, formed in 1938 as the “Ranger Air Group” had a lineage that dated back to the Navy’s first purpose-built flattop. Consisting of VF-1 (Hellcats including photo and night fighter variants), VBF-1 (Corsairs) VB-1 (Helldivers), and VT-1 (Avengers), they arrived in the Philippines in mid-June 1945 on White Plains, the same jeep carrier which would tote CVG-82 home.

CVG-1 stood some 163 pilots and 98 aircraft strong.

Starting flight operations on 1 July, they would soon get a bite at the decaying Japanese apple, striking Tokyo just 10 days later. CVG-1 would spend the next five weeks hammering industrial, military, and naval targets across Honshu in what could really be looked at as mopping up operations.

Nonetheless, this allowed the group, and by extension Bennington, to put the final nails in the Imperial Navy’s coffin, logging hits on the 22,000-ton Unryū-class fleet carriers Amagi and Katsuragi; the hybrid carrier-battleships Hyuga and Ise, and the cherished battlewagon Nagato, among others taking refuge in the mine-blocked Inland Sea.

Salvaging parts of a damaged VBF-1 Corsair Aboard the USS Bennington (CV-20), 4 July 1945. 80-GK-6176

Raids on Japan, 1945. Japanese carrier Amagi under attack at Kure, on 24 July 1945. Photo by USS Bennington (CV-20). 80-G-490165

Raids on Japanese Home Islands, July 30, 1945. Japanese carriers of the Amagi-Katsuragi class hit by bombers at Kure Bay, Japan. Radio photograph. 80-G-490169

One of CVG-1’s most hard-felt losses was that of VB-1’s squadron commander, LCDR Andrew B Hamm (USNA ’39) when his SB2C-4E Helldiver was shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Kure on 28 July. Hamm’s folks in Alabama were given his posthumous Navy Cross, earned on a previous raid when he landed a 1,000-pound armor-piercing bomb on the carrier Amagi. He was one of 26 pilots and aircrewmen listed killed or missing from the group in their short time on Bennington— almost one per day.

A CVG-1 Corsair launches from the deck of the carrier USS Bennington CV-20 on 14 August 1945. Note the battleship on the horizon

When the Emperor threw in the towel on 14 August, Bennington and her air group spent the next two weeks jogging up and down the coast from Northern Honshu to Southern Hokkaido and back, cataloging 11 Allied POW camps around the region, many of which were not previously known.

Captured by one of CVG-1’s F6F-5P recon birds

They dropped 5.5 tons of supplies from TBMs using canopies repurposed from parachute flares with “more than one pilot expressing his deep satisfaction in making a perfect drop to starving prisoners who by their enthusiastic gestures indicated how welcome their packages were to them.”

CVG-1 was able to clean up its planes and put 83 aviators in the air in everything that could get off the deck to spearhead the “show of force” overflight of USS Missouri during the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on 2 September although the carrier was still 100 miles offshore.

Bennington carried on with her role of patrol and mounting photo recon missions along the Japanese Home Islands until 10 September, when she finally steamed into Tokyo Bay and berthed for a weeklong rest.

There, on 13 September 1945, her crew celebrated the ship’s first birthday complete with entertainment and a “grand dinner.” As noted in her War History, “The birthday actually occurred a little more than a month previous of course (6 August but the celebration was necessarily delayed due to combat operations.”

Big Benn remained in the Far East until mid-October and then went back stateside for the first time since January, dropping off her low-mileage air group at Saipan. CVG-1 would later return to be disestablished at Alameda NAS via the east-bound jeep carrier USS Kwajalein (CVE-98). They had been on Bennington for 30,381 steaming miles in just over three months and made 3,323 landings on her decks.

CVG-1s scorecard for July-August 1945:

Entering San Francisco Bay on 7 November sans aircraft, Bennington remained there over the holidays until January 1946 when she set out for Pearl Harbor with a load of planes and a draft of men headed West for occupation duty.

USS Bennington (CV 20) – Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – January 1946

Remaining in the Hawaiian Islands for training for a few months, the carrier was given orders for Norfolk, via the Panama Canal, and arrived there on 22 April.

On 8 November 1946, she was decommissioned and berthed with the Atlantic Reserve Fleet along the James River.

Bennington earned three battle stars for World War II service: 1) Iwo Jima operation, 15 Feb – 4 Mar 1945, 2) Okinawa Gunto Operation, 17 Mar – 11 Jun 1945, 3) Third Fleet operations against Japan 10 Jul – 15 Aug 1945.

Another, Colder, War

Bennington’s mothball slumber lasts just under four years.

Reawakened in October 1950 due to the war in Korea, she was towed to her birthplace at New York Naval Shipyard for an extensive SCB-27A conversion to allow her to handle jets including a pair of new hydraulic Type H Mark 8 (H8) catapults. This upgrade took two grueling years and, once it was finished, she recommissioned on 13 November 1952.

In this, she had been reclassified as an “Attack Aircraft Carrier” to differentiate her from her unconverted sisters and redesignated CVA-20.

Her first jet-and helicopter-equipped air group, CVG-7, composed of VF-71 (F2H Banshee) and VF-72 (F9F Panthers), VF-74 (Corsairs), and VA-75 (AD-4 Skyraiders), along with a det of HUP-2 whirlybirds, arrived on board in February 1953 for Bennington’s Caribbean shakedown cruise and subsequent September 1953- February 1954 Med deployment for NATO exercises.

A F9F-4 Panther from NATC at NAS Patuxent on USS Bennington (CVA 20) 19 April 1954.

It was during this period that she suffered an explosion in her No. 1 fireroom on 27 April 1953 that claimed the lives of 11 men and put her in the yard for two weeks of repair.

She would soon suffer far worse.

Just after returning from the Med, while conducting flight operations off Narragansett Bay with Air Group 181 on 26 May 1954, a series of explosions rocked the carrier after her port catapult accumulator burst and filled the air with vaporized lubricating oil which detonated, immolating the wardroom and crew’s mess which were in the compartments directly above. The fire killed 91 men outright while another 12 succumbed to wounds. Over 200 were injured. twelve would die later from their injuries.

Had it not been for the fact that helicopters and small boats were able to rapidly medevac 82 critically injured sailors ashore to the nearby Naval Hospital in Newport, surely more would have perished.

Sailors injured in the below-deck explosions and fires on board the USS Bennington are carried by elevator to the flight deck for transport to Newport Naval Hospital, 26 May 1954.

The Bennington explosion, almost totally forgotten by the public today, was the second worst U.S. Navy accident during peacetime in terms of lives lost, only surpassed by the 1952 collision between USS Hobson (DD 464) and USS Wasp (CV 18) that left the destroyer cut in half and with 176 men killed or missing.

Her deck bulged in numerous places and with most of the front third of the ship with twisted I beams and blackened compartments, Bennington returned once more to New York Naval Shipyard under her own power on 12 June 1954, where she completed a longer SCB-125 conversion that added an enclosed hurricane bow– to lessen the potential for damage in heavy weather– and of an angled flight deck to improve the efficiency of air operations.

She looked very different upon completion of this, her second major overhaul and conversion in five years. 

USS Bennington (CV-20) off Point Loma near the entrance to San Diego Bay in the late 1950s

Bennington emerged from NYNSY on 19 March 1955 and would embark a new air wing, Air Task Group (ATG) 201, that September for an eight-month “around the Horn” West Pac cruise.

Bennington with ATG-201 embarked, in 1956, seen simultaneously landing an AD Skyraider and catapulting an FH Phantom. Note that she has an enclosed bow now but no bridle catchers handing over. 

Bennington, as modernized. NH 67558

Then, in rapid succession, came another new group ATG-181 for a 1956-57 West Pac cruise.

F9F-8 Cougar of Fighter Squadron (VF) 174 launches from Bennington (CVA 20) as another squadron aircraft prepares to maneuver onto the catapult during flight operations in 1956. NNAM collection.

A U.S. Navy North American AJ-2 Savage of heavy attack squadron VAH-6 Det. N Fleurs landing on the aircraft carrier USS Bennington (CVA-20). VAH-6 Det. N was assigned to Air Task Group 181 (ATG-181) for a deployment to the Western Pacific from 15 October 1956 to 22 May 1957. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.3301

F2H-3 Banshee of Marine Fighter Squadron (VMF) 214 pictured while making touch-and-go approaches on board the carrier Bennington (CVA 20) on 2 November 1956. NNAM collection.

Talk about the recruiting poster! Stern of USS Bennington (CVA-20) at Hong Kong, showing her 3″/50 Mk 33 AAA twin mounts. Bennington, with assigned Air Task Group 181 (ATG-181), was deployed to the Western Pacific from 15 October 1956 to 22 May 1957.

San Francisco Naval Shipyard with USS Hancock (CVA-19), the USS Oriskany (CVA-34), and the USS Bennington (CVA-20), 3 October 1957. K-23227

A U.S. Navy North American FJ-4B Fury (BuNo 143574) from Attack Squadron VA-146 Blacktails after landing aboard the aircraft carrier USS Bennington (CVA-20) during carrier qualifications off Southern California (USA) in April 1958. VA-146 was assigned a the time to Carrier Air Group 14 (CVG-14) aboard the much larger supercarrier USS Ranger (CVA-61). NNAM No. 1996.253.7230.017

Fly Navy! FJ3 Fury of VF-173 on board of USS Bennington during the middle of the 50s. (US Navy)

Official U.S. Navy Photograph. Catalog #: USN 1036055

The angled deck USS Bennington (CVA-20) passes the wreck of USS Arizona (BB-39) in Pearl Harbor on Memorial Day, 31 May 1958. Bennington’s crew is in formation on the flight deck, spelling out a tribute to Arizona’s crewmen who were lost in the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. USN 1036055

Her final West Pac cruise as a CVA (August 1958 through January 1959) came with ATG-4 embarked.

USS_Bennington_(CVA-20)_underway_c 1958 with ATG 4

Air Task Group 1 (ATG-1) embarked on USS Bennington (CVA 20) in 1958 off Hawaii. Note how big those Savages look!

On 30 June 1959, Bennington was reclassified as an “Antisubmarine Warfare Support Aircraft Carrier” (CVS), a designation that eight of her sisters (Essex, Yorktown, Hornet, Randolph, Wasp, Intrepid, Kearsarge, and Lake Champlain) would share.

The big change that this meant, besides switching to an air group made up of S-2 Trackers and SH-3 Sea Kings with a few AD-5W (EA-1E) Skyraiders for airborne early warning, was having a bow-mounted SQS-23 sonar installed in a SCB-144 conversion.

Five Essex-class flattops at Long Beach Navy Yard. USS Bennington, Yorktown, and Hornet (angled flight decks; no bridle catchers) are configured as ASW carriers; USS Bon Homme Richard (angled deck; with bridle catchers) is an attack carrier; USS Valley Forge (straight axial flight deck with heli zones marked) is serving as LPH-8

Her go-to anti-submarine air group (CVSG) during the 1960s, with which she made six West Coast deployment cruises, was CVSG-59. It was made up, in general, of the “World Famous and Internationally Traveled Screwbirds” of VS-33 and the “Red Griffins” of VS-38 (Trackers), the “Eightballers” of HS-8 (H-34/HSS-1 Seabat/SH-34G then later Sea Kings), and a det from the “Early Elevens” of VAW-11 (Skyraiders, later replaced with E-1B Tracers after 1965).

Note her red and blue H-34/HSS-1 Seabat/SH-34Gs of HS-8, which deployed on Bennington between October 1960 and August 1963 when the squadron switched to Sea Kings

USS Bennington (CVS-20) and USS Braine (DD-630) during an underway replenishment in the Pacific Ocean, circa in 1960. Note her wing of helos and Trackers

Bennington (CV-20), Benner (DD-807), USS Eversole (DD-789), Alfred A. Cunningham (DD-752), and O’Brien (DD-725), on 25 November 1963 honoring the passing of JFK.

Sent to Vietnam on four of her CVS West Pac cruises (Feb-Sept 1964, March-Oct 1965, Nov. 1966-May 1967, and May-December 1968) Bennington also carried a few A-4 Skyhawks for muscle.

Flight deck personnel stand by to prepare for the next launch as an A-4C Skyhawk of Antisubmarine Fighter (VSF) 1 roars down the catapult during carrier qualification aboard the antisubmarine warfare Bennington (CVS 20) 18 November 1967. NNAM photo.

USS Bennington (CVS-20) underway off the coast of California, 25 November 1967. Photographed by Dolenga. NH 97582

Bennington (CVS-20) in Pearl Harbor 17 May 1968

USS Bennington (CVS-20) at Pearl Harbor, in May 1968 while outbound on her last Vietnam cruise. She has CVSG-59 aboard. USN KN-1702

USS Mauna Kea (AE-22) high lines ammunition to the USS Bennington (CVS-20) in the Gulf of Tonkin, the 10 September 1968. Our carrier has nine S-2E Trackers, two E-1B Tracer “Stoof with a Roof” models, and at least four SH-3A Sea Kings on deck. This would be Bennington’s final deployment and would end on 9 November. USN 1137061

A visiting USAF HH-3 Jolly Green Giant tagged on Bennington’s decks, likely off SE Asia

In between West Pac cruises, Bennington also clocked in in the 1960s for runs along the California coast in which she served as a training carrier for qualifications and handled experimental aircraft.

She served as the floating testbed for the big Ling-Temco-Vought XC-124A, a wild tri-service tilt-wing cargo aircraft that predated the CV-22 by decades.

Able to carry 32 equipped troops or 4 tons of cargo with a 470nm combat range, it had a max T/O weight of 45,000 pounds (about twice that of the C-1 Trader carrier delivery aircraft) and a 67-foot wingspan. While this sounds crazy, the C-2 Greyhound went to 50K pounds and had an 80-foot span, but then again nobody wanted to land a C-2 on an Essex-class carrier anyway.

It was thought that as many as 25 folding-wing navalized XC-124s could be carried on the deck of an 18,000-ton Iwo Jima-class LPH (or on an old Essex class CVA/CVS in a pinch), capable of lifting an 800-man Marine battalion landing team ashore in one go– again, predating the LHD/MV-22 concept by a good bit.

Bennington would host the No. 5 XC-124A airframe for 44 STOL take-offs and landings and 6 full VTOL cycles in wind conditions ranging to 30 knots.

An XC-124A after landing aboard the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Bennington (CVS-20) off San Diego, California (USA), on 18 May 1966. Note the Sikorsky SH-3A Sea King in the background.

She also pitched in with the Apollo program, picking up the first module launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

USS Bennington (CVS 20) Apollo 4 spacecraft November 9th, 1967

The Apollo Four Command Module is hoisted onboard USS Bennington (CVS-20) following splashdown at 3:37 pm., 934 nautical miles northwest of Honolulu. Damage to the heat shield from the extreme heat of reentry is evident. Photograph released November 9, 1967. 428-GX-K-45494

With the Navy looking to pare down its WWII-era carriers, then rapidly pushing through their 20s, in favor of a new (Nimitz) class of CVNs, Bennington was decommissioned on 15 January 1970 and placed in mothballs at Bremerton in Puget Sound.

She had spent 18 years with the fleet and earned three battle stars in WWII and five during Vietnam. 

Kept on the bench

The Navy retained four Essex class carriers in reserve on the Naval List through the 1980s: Bennington, Bon Homme Richard, Hornet, and Oriskany.

It was thought, semi-realistically for a while, that they could be a mobilization asset to run S-3 Vikings (if the catapults worked), SH-3/SH-60s, and Marine AV-8 Harriers from them as a “sea control ship” on convoy support in the event of a WWIII Red Storm Rising type of event– given enough lead time.

Plans were even floated in 1981 by SECNAV Lehman to bring back Oriskany to active duty as a “strike carrier” in peacetime, equipped with a wing made up totally of Marine A-4M Skyhawks (2 squadrons= 48 aircraft) and 4-6 SH-3 helicopters, as well as possibly Harriers, ideally to support Marine operations ashore.

The GAO kind of filled that concept full of holes: 

With it thought that Oriskany had 10-15 years left in her, the fact that Skyhawks were on their way out (only 118 were on hand in 1981 and the last active Marine A-4 squadron shuttered in 1990), and the 24-month/1.1 million man-hour reactivation overhaul was estimated to cost $500 million in 1981 dollars, the Navy pulled the plug on that concept.

Still, Big Benn and her four sisters languished in the ordinary for two decades. 

As Bennington and Hornet were SCB.27A ships, with hydraulic instead of steam catapults, they likely would have been reactivated without their cats, leaving them restricted to Harriers and SH-3/SH-60s, but that still could satisfy as an ASW carrier.

Hornet and Bennington in the 1973 Janes.

She even looked good, despite the fact she was on red lead row.

Four decommissioned aircraft carriers, Naval Inactive Ships Maintenance Facility, Bremerton, Wash. ex-USS Hornet (CVS-12), ex-USS Oriskany (CV-34), ex-USS Bennington (CVS-20), and ex-USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31)

Pacific Reserve Fleet, Bremerton, Washington, July 1974. The major units here are USS Missouri (BB-63), New Jersey (BB-62), Hornet (CVS-12 and Bennington (CVS-20).

Bremerton Washington Mothball Fleet, 1989: USS Hornet, USS Chicago, USS Oriskany, USS Bennington, USS Bon Homme Richard and USS Nimitz in the distance, 

USS Bennington (CVS 20) laid up at the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility Jan 25 1990 DN-SC-90-03981

1992: USS Hornet, USS New Jersey, USS Oriskany, USS Bennington, USS Midway. Mothball Fleet, PSNS Bremerton, plus minesweepers and destroyers

However, nothing lasts forever and, with the end of the Cold War, the Navy moved to divest itself of the last of its lingering steam-powered warships from battleships through frigates.

Bennington was stricken on 20 September 1989, just days before the Berlin Wall came down, and sold for scrap in January 1994 to a breaker in India.

Her island and masts were shorn, and armament and sensors removed, then towed to Alang in March 1995 for scrapping by hand.

Bennington became only the second fleet carrier to be sold for scrap outside the United States, following sister USS Shangri-La (CV-38) which had been sent to a yard in Taiwan in 1988. Subsequent flattops disposed of by dismantling including the Forrestal and Kitty Hawk-class supercarriers recycled in the past 20 years have all gone to Texas for breaking.

When Bennington was gone, the Navy only had two other Essex class carriers still in mothballs and one of those, USS Hornet (CV-12) went on to become a museum shortly after while Oriskany (CV-34) was sunk as a reef off Pensacola in 2006. Other sisters preserved include Lexington, Intrepid, and Yorktown— all of which had the same 1950s SCB-125 conversion and subsequent 1960s CVS service as Bennington, so they are all great representations of what the old girl looked like.

Epilogue

Bennington’s WWII War Diaries are in the National Archives as is her War History and those of CVG-82 and CVG-1.

There has not been another naval vessel named Bennington.

Big Ben is remembered fondly by the Bennington Reunion Group, which has a superb online presence that dates back to 1999. Sadly, they do not seem to have held a reunion since 2017, as their members are no doubt dwindling. Keep in mind an 18-year-old bluejacket on her crew list when she was decommissioned for the last time is now pushing age 75.

On 26 May 2004, a bronze plaque was installed at Fort Adams State Park in Rhode Island, near the spot where Bennington had her terrible catapult explosion and fire, to memorialize the event and the crewmembers lost.

Likewise, the city of Bennington has had custody of her bell for the past several decades and includes it in a ceremonial parade and ringing on the town green every Independence Day. 

Of Bennington’s historic WWII air groups, CVG-82 was redesignated to CVAG-17 and later CVG-17 before being disestablished in 1968. CVG-1, which earned two Presidential Unit Citations during the war, has served aboard nine different carriers since then and today, as Carrier Air Wing One (CVW-1), is based at NAS Oceana and is assigned to USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75).

Her primary CVS air group, CVSG-59, after Bennington was mothballed, went on ship out with sisters Yorktown, Hornet, and Ticonderoga— and took part in the recovery of Apollos 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, and 17– before it was disestablished in June 1973.

Finally, her plankowner skipper, RADM James Bennett Skyes, who earned a Navy Cross while in command of the carrier in 1945, retired from the Navy in 1953. He passed at his Texas home in 1981, aged 86, and was survived by two daughters, four grandsons, and three great-grandsons.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Task Force Spaghetti, RIMPAC Adjacent

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While Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC) ’24 off Hawaii — the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise– just wrapped up its 29th outing since it was established in 1971, one that included 29 nations, 40 surface ships, three submarines, 14 national land forces, more than 150 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel– there was also another large exercise going on at the same time in the Pacific that gets very little attention.

And it included an Italian carrier task force, something never before seen in those waters.

Going back to 1981, the Royal Australian Air Force-led Exercise Pitch Black 24 has grown increasingly over the past four decades.

This year’s event was the biggest ever, including 20 participating nations and over 140 aircraft from around the globe. While typically shore-based, with aircraft from the U.S. (F-22s), Singapore, Indonesia, India, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Spain, Brunei, New Zealand, and Canada flying in, the Italians showed up with a carrier task force, 31st Grupponavale, centered around the 27,000-ton aircraft carrier Cavour (C550).

Cavour’s embarked air group blended six F-35B STOVL Lightnings and another six legacy AV-8B/TAV-8B Harrier II Plus aircraft of GRUPAER (Gruppo Supporto Aerei Imbarcati della Marina Militare) Lupi, as well as EH101 and SH90 helicopters. She has hangar and deck space for 20~ aircraft, so this is about right.

It is nice to see AV-8Bs still making it happen

Cavour was escorted by the 7,000-ton Bergamini-class ASW FREMM frigate Alpino (F-594).

Cavour and Alpino called at Darwin, a historic first.

Cavour at Darwin during Pitch Black 2024. RAAF LACW Annika Smith

The Italian Navy frigate Alpino F-594 arrived at the Kuru Wharf at HMAS Coonawarra in Darwin, Northern Territory, ahead of Exercise Pitch Black 24. RAAF LAC Kurt Lewis

In all, Cavour’s group chalked up 70 flight hours and 20 missions during Pitch Black, including refueling and air-to-air interaction with aircraft belonging to nine of the 20 participating nations.

This led to some great formation shots with Cavour and Alpino underway in the Coral Sea and an RAAF E-7A Wedgetail, F-18F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler; Italian Harrier and F-35B; Indian Su-30MKI, Philippine FA-50PH, Luftwaffe Typhoon, and JASDF F-2As overhead. If you told a circa 1942 USN vet this would happen one day they would surely scratch their head.

A Royal Australian Air Force E-7A Wedgetail leads a formation of aircraft past the Italian Navy aircraft carrier ITS Cavour during Exercise Pitch Black 2024. RAAF photo Corporal Sam Miller

RAAF photo Corporal Sam Miller

A Royal Australian Air Force E-7A Wedgetail leads a formation of aircraft during Exercise Pitch Black 2024. RAAF photo Corporal Sam Miller

RAAF photo Corporal Sam Miller

RAAF photo Corporal Sam Miller

The Most Beautiful Ship in the World

Meanwhile, another of Cavour’s escorts on her 2024 Pacific cruise, the 5,800-ton Thaon di Revel-class offshore patrol vessel ITS Montecuccoli (P432), was detached to participate in RIMPAC and met up at sea with the “most beautiful ship in the world,” the Italian navy’s historic nave scuola (training ship) Amerigo Vespucci (A5312) which was inbound for Honolulu from Los Angeles on her own independent cruise.

This led to some amazing shots of the two in a series PASSEX maneuvers.

Built at the Royal Shipyard of Castellammare di Stabia and running some 329 feet in length over the bowsprit, Vespucci’s main mast towers 177 feet into the air and, when fully rigged, she carries up to 26 canvas sails.

Vespucci recently celebrated her 90th birthday and set sail last July on a 20-month, 40,000-mile world cruise that will see the Italian ship dock at 31 ports in 28 nations, visiting five continents.

Her crew and cadets made sure to pay respect and honors to USS Arizona during their visit to Pearl. 

Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 1, 2024: Going Dutch on a (Baby) Flat-top

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 1, 2024: Going Dutch on a Baby Flat-top

Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie 2158_005349

Above we see a big Vliegtuigsquadron 860 (VSQ 860) Fairey Firefly Mk. I of the Dutch Marine Luchtvaartdienst, her quad 20mm Hispano Mk.V cannons clearly visible on her folded wings, as the strike aircraft is being made ready to launch from the deck of Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (QH 1), Holland’s first vliegkampschip (aircraft carrier), to join operations against rebel forces on Java on 13 October 1946.

It was the jeep carrier’s second war.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet Nairana

The Tasmanian word for a huge (and endangered) wedge-tailed eagle local to those seas, the first HMS Nairana got her name honest– she was born with it as the Huddart Parker Lines passenger ferry TSS Nairana, ordered from the Scottish firm of William Denny & Brothers in January 1914. While still on the ways, the 352-foot/3,000-ton passenger steamer was converted to handle seaplanes and commissioned into the Royal Navy in 1917.

Outfitted with a 95-foot flying platform, she could carry as many as eight single-engine floatplanes and finished the war with the Battle Cruiser Force before heading to North Russia to support the Allied intervention there during the Russian Civil War. Returned to her original owners in 1921, she worked in the commercial trade in Australia until 1948, including troopship service in WWII.

The first HMS Nairana, a seaplane tender, in her 1917-1918 dazzle pattern camouflage. Note her forward flying deck, stern recovery boom, hangar, and several small Sopwith floatplanes. IWM SP 1292, photo by Surgeon Oscar Parkes

Our subject had much the same backstory, just a 1940s version.

Laid down in November 1941 as a fast refrigerated cargo/passenger carrier by the Scottish shipbuilding firm of John Brown & Company on the Clydebank for Port Lines, she instead was diverted to Admiralty use once the new war got going. Acquired by the Royal Navy in 1942, she was soon finished as an escort carrier, HMS Nairana (D 05). Her only sister was the similarly converted HMS Vindex (D 15) while a third ship, HMS Campania (D 48), is more of a half-sister.

Nairana line drawing by Dr. Dan Saranga

Commissioned on 26 November 1943, Nairana went 17,000 tons (fully loaded) with an overall length across the flight deck of 528 feet while her beam ran 68 feet wide. Armament was two twin QF 4″/45 cal DP Mk XVI guns, four quad 40mm Mk VII QF pom-poms (possibly the most British of AAA guns), and eight twin 20 mm/70 Oerlikon Mark Vs.

Belowdecks was a 231-foot hangar serviced by a single centerline elevator. She had a single C-II catapult installed, which was capable of launching a 6.4-ton aircraft from a standstill to 70 knots. Her avgas capacity was 62,000 gallons, enough to fuel an empty Swordfish 370 times or a Martlet (Wildcat) 452 times. It was thought this sufficed to support a wing of as many as 20 single-engine aircraft.

Speed was 17 knots on her economical marine diesels, with a cruising range of 13,000nm at 15 knots– a convoy escort dream!

They would ultimately carry Type 277, Type 281В, and Type 293 radars.

Nairana and her sister(s) were a little larger and a couple knots faster than the most numerous RN escort carriers– the 34 American-built Bogue-class CVEs sent over via Lend-Lease and known as the Ameer, Attacker, Ruler, or Smiter class in British service depending on their arrangement. However, the Bogues had a second elevator and were thought capable of operating as many as 28 aircraft despite their smaller hangars and flight decks.

War!

The Royal Navy Research Archive has a great entry on Nairana’s WWII service but we’ll do more of a sum up for brevity.

HMS Nairana, escort carrier, 17 February 1944, Greenock, Scotland. Note the abundance of Carley floats and an embarked airwing. Photo by LT SJ Beadell, IWM A21848

Embarking her first air group of 12 Mk. II Swordfish and the personnel of the Fleet Air Arm’s 838 Squadron on 17 December 1943 (soon changed out to a mix of nine Swords and a half dozen Sea Hurricane Mk. IIcs of 835 NAS), our little carrier was nominated for service in the Western Approaches with the Liverpool-based 2nd British Escort Group. The role: Atlantic convoy defense.

Between 29 January 1944 when she tapped in on OS 066KM and 27 February 1945 when she left RA 064, Nairana helped escort no less than 21 convoys. These ran the gamut from the Freetown, Sierra Leone to Liverpool runs (SL & OS convoys) to Mediterranean runs (KMF, KMS, and MKS convoys) to the very dangerous Kola Pen/Murmansk runs (JW and RA convoys).

HMS Nairana, escort carrier, June 1944, view from one of her planes looking back. Note her camouflaged flight deck. IWM A 24131

HMS Nairana, an escort carrier, underway. Note what appears to be five 835 Squadron Sea Hurricanes forward, which should put this image in January-June 1944. IWM FL 12664

Her air group- which by October 1944 had grown to 14 Mk. III Swords and 6 Mk.VI Martlets of 835 NAS– in particular was very successful, downing at least two Bv138 long-range reconnaissance flying boats and numerous JU88s on the Russia run, along with three giant Junkers Ju 290s of FAGr 5 over the Bay of Biscay. They also reportedly attacked at least two surfaced U-boats (though without any confirmed sinkings).

In between convoy runs, Nairana served as a temporary home to the Barracuda of 768 DLT squadron and the Fireflies of 816 squadron for workups and was tasked with three different anti-shipping raids off the coast of occupied Norway (Operations Sampler, Winded, and Prefix/Muscular) in early 1945.

Of the Norway raids, Winded proved the most successful with Nairana’s Swords, operating alongside those of her sister Campania’s embarked 813 Sqn, managing to blitz four coasters on 28 January off Larsnes/Vaagsö, sinking the J.M. (164 GRT) and Varp (114 GRT) with rockets and bombs. Nobody said ani-shipping operations were glamorous.

By late March 1945, with the Soviets knocking on the door of Berlin and the Western Allies crossing the Rhine, the Atlantic convoy game was starting to wind down. 835 Naval Air Squadron, Nairana’s go-to air group, was disbanded on 1 April 1945 at RNAS Hatston, her Swords put to pasture in favor of Avengers and Barracuda, while her Martlets were handed over to 821 Sqn.

Meanwhile, eyes turned to the Pacific.

From King to Queen

With the British Pacific Fleet getting very muscular in 1945– the RN had six large armored fleet carriers, four light carriers, two maintenance carriers, and nine escort carriers (with over 750 embarked aircraft) along with five battlewagons and 100 escorts arrayed against the Japanese– realization came that the campaign to liberate the Dutch East Indies would soon be underway.

Keep in mind it wasn’t until July 1945 that the first Oboe-series landings in the Japanese-occupied DEI occurred at Balikpapan and it was felt that the campaign to root the Emperor’s forces out would likely take upwards of a year, based on what the U.S. Sixth Army was facing in the Philippines. This coalesced with the thinking that the planned final Allied landings in the Japanese home islands, Operations Downfall, Olympic, and Cornet, would see fighting lasting through most of 1946. Remember, there were still squad-sized units of Japanese surrendering on Hollandia and Morotai as late as 1956– with the latter island where the last holdout wouldn’t be caught until December 1974! 

Therefore, to give the Dutch some carrier power, starting in June 1945, Nairana began a series of operations off Scotland with an embarked squadron (VSQ 860) of the Free Dutch Navy along with officers and senior NCOs to be used as a cadre to operate their own carrier.

The squadron, formed in June 1943, had previously flown Swordfish from two Royal Dutch Shell-owned and manned tankers, MV Gadila and MV Macoma, which had been given flying decks to perform as Merchant Aircraft Carriers. They rode shotgun on 45 convoys.

Gadila (left) and Macoma (right), were converted to MAC carriers in June 1944. They still carried their oil cargo but also embarked 4-to-6 of NAS/VSQ 860’s Swordfish on convoy overwatch through April 1945. Macoma served as a MAC on 24 convoys and Gadila on 21.

Using Fairey Barracuda transferred hot from the RN FAA’s 822 Squadron, the Dutch of VSQ 860 got in their first carrier cats and traps as a squadron from Nairana.

A Fairey Barracuda MK II of NAS/VSQ 860 on the elevator of HMS Nairana, circa November-December 1945. NIMH 2158_102013

A Dutch deck party moving around a NAS/VSQ 860 Barracuda on HMS Nairana, circa November-December 1945. NIMH 2158_102018

A RATO-equipped Fairey Barracuda of Vliegtuigsquadron 860 lifts off from HMS Nairana, rolling over the stowed aircraft barrier. NIMH 2158_102038

A flaps-down NAS/VSQ 860 Barracuda comes in to trap on HMS Nairana under the control of a paddle-equipped LSO, circa November-December 1945. NIMH 2158_022771

A better look at that Dutch LSO, with Nairana’s eight arrestor wires and barricade in the background. Not a lot of room for error on a straight-deck 500-foot CVE! NIMH 2158_102040

A NAS/VSQ 860 Barracuda traps on HMS Nairana, circa November-December 1945. Notably, she had eight arrestor wires while her near-sisters Vindex and Campania only had six. NIMH 2158_102012

HMS Nairana with her hangar deck filled with Barracuda of Vliegtuigsquadron 860, circa November-December 1945. NIMH 2158_102014

Nairana was formally transferred to Dutch control in a quiet ceremony at Gareloch, Scotland on 20 March 1946. The British flag (Union Jack) was lowered and the Dutch Prinsengeus hoisted, with appropriate salutes and honors rendered from both sides.

The changeover NIMH 2158_101372

Her new name, Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (QH 1), came as a salute to RADM Karel Willem Frederik Marie Doorman, killed in the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942 when his flagship was torpedoed during the battle and he elected to ride it to the bottom rather than abandon ship.

Dutch WWII poster, depicting Admiral Karel Doorman and his flagship light cruiser De Ruyter

Her first Dutch skipper was Capt. Alfred de Booy, a Java-born career naval officer with 28 years of service who had formerly commanded the frigate Hr.Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau (which was sunk in May 1940) and served as naval attaché in London. 

Karel Doorman on the day she was transferred, 20 March 1946. Note her D 05 hull number she wore as Nairana has been painted out. NIMH 2158_025456

Karel Doorman, 20 March 1946, in rough shape but with her Prinsengeus flying, and her old British D 05 hull number. NIMH 2158_000829

Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (QH 1) at the Royal Naval Dockyard Rosyth, where she was dry docked for the first three weeks of May 1946 just after the transfer. NIMH 101450

Fresh out of dry dock. Note she still retains her wartime camouflage and Carley floats and has her new QH 1 hull number applied to her bow. NIMH 2158_000845

Note her pennant number has been more haphazardly applied to her starboard side. NIMH 2158_000846

Kaarel Doorman Janes 1946

I found this short (silent) video of her in the NIMH archives from this period. 

Another War!

Following four months of refit and puttering around the North Sea, it was decided to send the country’s first aircraft carrier to its ongoing liberation and pacification efforts in the Dutch East Indies, where Japanese die-hards and Indonesian insurgents were embroiled in a war of independence. Seen off by Prince Bernhard, she would leave Holland in August 1946.

Honor guard, equipped with British Pattern 37 kit and .303 caliber SMLEs, present arms for the visit of Prince Bernhard to the carrier at Rotterdam’s Merwehaven, 6 August 1946. NIMH 2158_101511

Getting right with her gunnery, just in case. Note the peculiar arrangement of the twin Oerlikons on Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman, complete with early aiming computer. NIMH 2158_101519

She proceeded to Glasgow to pick up 15 new (to the Dutch) Firefly Mk Is, transferred from Royal Naval Air Station Fearn, which would be assigned to VSQ 860. Besides the aircraft, Karel Doorman would also pick up some 2,000 tons of parts, tools, and ordnance, as well as 130 aircrew and enlisted.

Another 15 Firefly Mk Is, sold to the Dutch from FAA stocks just after Karel Doorman left Glasgow would go on to equip VSQ 861, then eventually be reassigned to 1 Sqn in the Dutch Antilles. In 1947, the Dutch purchased another 40 upgraded Firely FR.4s, which would be used by 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 Sqns. This would be augmented by 14 Mark NF.V radar-equipped night fighters delivered in 1949. The final Fireflies acquired by the Dutch were a quartet of ex-Canadian Navy aircraft purchased in 1952. 

Karel Doorman at the George V Docks in Glasgow, 26-to-29 August 1946 giving a good shot of her aft 4″/45 twin mount. NIMH 2158_025464

A VSQ 860 Firefly Mk I, one of 15, being stowed in Karel Doorman’s hangar on 26 August 1946. Note it still carries RN FAA roundels. NIMH 101445.

Observe the small Dutch orange and black triangle national marking applied near the cockpit. This style had already been replaced by the current four-color (blue, white, red, and orange) roundel. NIMH 101375

Leaving Glasgow on 1 September, her crew crossed the equator and called at Simonstown on the way to Java.

Crossing the Line ceremony on board Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman with Captain A. de Booy receiving the “Grand Cross in the Order of the Floating Bar” from Neptune, 11 September 1946. NIMH 101459

While near the Cocos Islands, her Fireflies launched on 13 October and flew some 500 km to the Kemajoran airfield near Batavia, with almost all arriving safely (one cracked up on landing without casualties).

MLD Firefly coming up the elevator on Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman, 13 October 1946. It still has its mix of British and obsolete Dutch markings. NIMH 2158_005348

Fairey Fireflies Mk.I taking off from Karel Doorman. NIMH 2158_000834

A group of four Fairey Fireflies Mk.1 airborne over Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman on their way to Kemajoran airfield. On the left is the frigate Hr.Ms. Van Galen. NIMH 2158_101547

Een formatie van drie Fairey Firefly I carrier-jager-verkenners, behorend tot de vloot van 860 Vliegtuigsquadron. NIMH 2158_012904

Soon afterward, VSQ 860 flew on to Morokrembangan, near Soerabaja in the east of the island, and the Dutch assumed responsibility for air support in the East Indies from the RAF, which had been hard at work doing it since before VJ Day.

Our carrier then commenced in a series of port calls in the region, stopping at Surabaya, Makassar, Moena, Ambon, and Banda.

While at Tandjong Priok near Jakarta, she picked up two captured Japanese floatplanes to be taken back to Holland for tests and display: a Kawanishi N1K (Rex) and an Aichi E13A (Jake).

Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman with a Japanese Aichi E13A floatplane on her deck on 7 November 1946. NIMH 2158_000839

A view showing both the N1K and E13A. NIMH 2158_005346

It was important for the Dutch to police up these former Japanese military planes as the local Indonesian forces (the TKRO) were gathering as many as they could for the coming struggle against the colonial forces. Of note, the Fireflies of VSQ 860 spoiled this in a big way on 27 July 1947 when they destroyed 36 Indonesian aircraft including seven very dangerous Ki-43-II Oscars on the ground at Maguwo airfield, leaving the TKRO in the area just four working aircraft to their name: two Yokosuka K5Y1 Willow (Cureng) biplane trainers, one Mitsubishi Ki-51 Sonia bomber, and one remaining Hayabusha. Interestingly, some of these still survive in the Indonesian Air Force Museum.

On the way back to Europe, by way of Dakar and Casablanca, Karel Doorman visited South Africa from 8 to 18 January 1947, where she was swamped by a local outpouring from the ethnic Dutch Boers.

Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman, sans visible aircraft, at Cape Town with Tafelberg in the background, January 1947. Note her hull numbers have been down-sized from the big white numbers seen earlier. NIMH 2158_000843

Back in Holland, the carrier had a brief refit at NV Dok en Werf Maatschappij Wilton-Fijenoord in Schiedam.

In het dok bij de NV Dok en Werf Maatschappij Wilton-Fijenoord, Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman. 18 February 1947. NIMH 2158_005336

NIMH 2158_005341

She then ventured out to make a series of port calls in Western Europe, in particular visiting London for a week in April. There, she received a silver salver from Albert Victor Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, KG, CH, PC, then the 1st Lord of the Admiralty.

Right 1st Viscount G.H. Hall, First Lord of the Admiralty, talking to Capt. A. de Booy, commander of Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman 18 April 1947. De Booy would go on to become the Dutch Navy’s CNO in 1950 and retire as a vice admiral in 1956. He passed in 1990, aged 89. NIMH 101443

This was followed up with a series of tactical exercises and a trip to Norway and Iceland with the River-class frigate Hr.Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau (ex-HMS Ribble) and D-Day veteran gunboat-turned-training ship Hr.Ms. Soemba as escorts.

Karel Doorman at Eidfjord, Norway, where she called 18-20 July 1947. NIMH 0018_101559

Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman on the piles at Maashaven, Rotterdam, 7 October 1947. Note she doesn’t have a camo flight deck any longer but still has her side camo. NIMH 2158_005338

In October 1947, she took members of Parliament and government ministers to sea for a series of trials with the country’s first naval helicopter, a Sikorsky S.51/H-5 (“Jezebel”), and Auster liaison aircraft.

The MLD’s Sikorsky S-51 Air Sea Rescue (ASR)/training helicopter H 1 “Jezebel.” In U.S. Navy service, the type was classified as the HO3S and saw much service in Korea on C-SAR missions for downed aircrew. NIMH 2158_026176

A second trip to the Dutch East Indies in the winter of 1947 saw her bring some replacement Fireflies to the country– three (F-22, F-24, and F-27) had been lost to ground fire and one to an accident– along with several Austers.

Taylorcraft Auster Mk.IIIs coming up from Karel Doorman’s hangar to fly ashore at Java. Note the new style roundels. NIMH 2158_005337

Taylorcraft Auster Mk.III taking off from Karel Doorman. NIMH 101381

A group photo of OVW members in front of the OO accommodation of the Marine Air Base Morokrembangan after the arrival of the aircraft carrier Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman in the Dutch East Indies, late 1947. NIMH 2158_025462

Three Fairey Firefly fighter-reconnaissance aircraft of VSQ 860 at Maospati airfield during the so-called Second Police Action (Operation Megatan). Also visible in the photo is an Auster AOP Mk.3 reconnaissance aircraft and a MLD-Catalina maritime patrol flying boat. NIMH 2158_023056

Review of Karel Doorman on 20 December 1947 by Vice-Admiraal Albertus Samuel Pinke, the commander of the naval forces in the Dutch East Indies from 1946 to 1949. Note the height-finding radar on a short tower by the deckhouse. NIMH 2158_101504

Repatriation

On 9 March 1948, Karel Doorman left Holland for the last time, returning to Plymouth where she was returned to the Royal Navy’s custody. Disarmed and with her sensors removed, she was sold for pennies on the pound to Port Line, the shipping company that had originally ordered her in 1941.

Following a conversion back to her more or less planned configuration at Harland and Wolff in Ireland, ex-Nairana/ex-Karel Doorman embarked on her third life as MV Port Victor in September 1949.

She continued her commercial service until 1971 when the well-traveled ship and twice-former aircraft carrier was sold to a breaker in Taiwan.

Her two near-sisters, Vindex and Campania, were the final two escort carriers in RN service.

Vindex and Campania in the 1946 ed of Jane’s.

Like Nairana/Doorman, Vindex was sold back to the Port Lines as the unimaginatively named MV Port Vindex in October 1947 and scrapped at Kaohsiung in August 1971.

Campania, decommissioned in December 1952 after supporting British atomic testing in the Pacific, was scrapped in 1955.

Epilogue

Karel Doorman is remembered fondly by the Dutch Navy as she was essentially the cradle of their sea-going naval aviation.

Maritime art of Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman in the Dutch Naval collection. NIMH 2158_005340

The second Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (R81), the 19,000-ton former Colossus-class light carrier HMS Venerable, was commissioned into the Dutch Navy on 28 May 1948 and operated until 1970 when she was third-handed to the Argentines as the Veinticinco de Mayo.

Vliegkampschip Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (R 81) ligt gepavoiseerd op de boeien. 2158_009425

The third Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (F827), commissioned in 1991, was the lead ship of a new class of ASW frigates for the Dutch. She retired in 2006 and continues to serve the neighboring Belgians as Louise-Marie (F931).

Fregat Karel Doorman (F 827) 2158_009637

The fourth Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman (A833), a 27,000-ton is a replenishment and logistic ship, commissioned in 2015 and is the largest ship to ever serve in the Dutch fleet.

Zr.Ms. Karel Doorman (A833)

As for VSQ 860, they continued flying air support missions over the Dutch East Indies until Indonesian independence in December 1949. After chalking up more than 2,000 sorties over the islands, the 11 remaining Karel Doorman-delivered Fireflies were shipped out.

The Dutch continued to use the type on Biak and Curacao in the West Indies. The last time the Firefly was deployed in anger by a European nation was in 1962 when the MLD flew its remaining aircraft in Biak against Indonesian forces encroaching on Dutch New Guinea before its transfer to Jakarta the next year.

A period Kodachrome of a full-color radar-equipped Firefly FR.Mk.IV night fighter of the Marine Luchtvaartdienst at Biak, Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea, ready to roll, circa 1961. In all, the Dutch operated some 80 Fireflies of all types during the Cold War, losing 25 to accidents and three (all of VSQ 860) to combat, withdrawing the last one in 1963. NIMH 2158_012906

Today– after flying Hawker Sea Fury FB.50s (5 July 1950 – 25 June 1956) and Sea Hawk FGA.50s (18 Sept 1957 – 30 Oct 1964) from the second Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman–860 is in the rotor wing business and has flown Wasps, Lynx (from the third Hr.Ms. Karel Doorman), and now NH90s, which it occasionally flies from the fourth Karel Doorman.

Some things never change.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday, July 24, 2024: To the Sea, to the World

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, July 24, 2024: To the Sea, to the World

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the Naval History and Heritage Command collections. Catalog #: NH 97002

Above we see khaki-clad officers of the newly-formed Republic of Korean Navy standing by as their country’s first large warship, the PC-461-class subchaser Baekdusan (also seen as Bak Dusan, Bak Du San, Pak Tu San, and Paktusan) (PC-701) has her teeth installed– a 3″/50 DP gun– at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, March 1950.

Bought via subscription and a tax on the service’s sailors (!) she would soon sail into harm’s way and the history books.

The PC-461 Class

Designed to provide a beefy little sub-buster– similar to Britain’s corvettes and sloops– that could float in shallow enough water (10-foot draft) to perform coastal operations but still have enough sea-keeping abilities and range (4,800 nm at 12 knots) to escort cross-ocean convoys without needing the same anti-ship capabilities as found on patrol frigates and destroyer escorts, the Navy ordered some 400 small submarine chasers based on a modified design of one of the pre-war Experimental Small Craft program’s “X-boats” the diesel-powered USS PC-451.

USS PC-451 was designed in 1938 and commissioned on 12 August 1940. Some 173 feet long, the 270-ton steel hulled diesel-powered subchaser could carry two 3″/50 DP guns, six 20mm guns, two Mk 20 Mousetrap projectors, two depth charge racks, and two K-gun depth charge throwers, all while making nearly 19 knots and just requiring a 65-man crew.

The follow-on PC-461 went a bit heavier and, carrying twin 1,440 bhp diesel engines, could break 22 knots (when clean) and tote essentially the same armament, and ship out with QHA sonar (as well as small set SF or SO or SCR-517A radars after 1942).

PC-461 was laid down in July 1941– just five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor– and eventually, some 343 of her class would be constructed by March 1945 across 13 small shipyards, all non-traditional to the Navy.

Camouflage Measure 32, Design 12P drawing prepared by the Bureau of Ships for a camouflage scheme intended for application to 173-foot submarine chasers (labeled on the drawing as PC-578 class). This plan, approved by Captain Torvald A. Solberg, USN, is dated 19 July 1944. It shows the ship’s starboard side, exposed decks, and the superstructure ends. 19-N-73643

USS PC-483 is underway in a Navy Kodachrome. Note the ship’s camouflage pattern. 80-GK-00428_001

USS PC-546 underway off the U.S. East Coast, circa 1942. Interestingly, these ships carried a false stack, as the diesel exhaust was routed through the hull sides. 80-G-K-13278

USS PC-546 from the stern.

Another stern shot of the 546 boat, note her thin 23-foot beam, welded hull, and already thinning hull black applied in a rush, sloppy fashion.

USS PC-472 underway near Hampton Roads, Virginia, 31 August 1942. Note her armament layout including a 3″/50 forward, another aft, two 20mm Oerlikons on the bridge wings, two stern DC racks, and two K guns. NH 96481

The PC-461s were some of the smallest U.S. Navy ships to carry a legit sonar listening set.

Undergoing a course of instruction with Naval sonar equipment aboard the USS PC 592 are two Naval Reservists, Seaman First Class F.C. Semkin and Apprentice Seaman G.S. Jackson, Naval Base, SC. Accession #: L55-03

Depth Charges (probably Mk. 6 type) mounted on a “K-gun” projector, and on ready service holders, on the stern of a 173-foot submarine chaser (pc). Taken at the sub-chaser training center, Miami, Florida, 11 May 1942. Note depth charge racks in the background. 80-G-16048

Depth Charge explodes in the wake of a U.S. Navy submarine chaser (PC) during World War II. The photo was taken before April 1944. The 173s could carry as many as 30 depth charges, with a cumulative “throw” of some 5 tons of high explosives. 80-G-K-13753

Submarine chasers and crew. (PC-483, 461, 466), Key West. As the number of AAA guns expanded, crews would grow to as many as 80 officers and enlisted, against a planned complement of 65. 80-GK-00427_001

A motor whaleboat was carried amidships along with a small crane to launch and recover it.

USS PC-620 is seen in Key West in this LIFE Kodachrome. Note her whaleboat, crane, after 3″/50, and depth charges galore.

“Easy Does It!” Crewmen of A 173-foot submarine Chaser (PC) stowing their craft’s dory, after hoisting it from the water, circa 1942. Note Camouflage paint on the boat. The photo was received from the Third Naval District on 17 May 1943. 80-G-K-16426

The PC-461s ranged far and wide, seeing service in every theatre. Four (PC 566, PC 565, PC 624, and PC 619) claimed kills on German U-boats, two (PC 487 and PC 1135) with sinking Japanese fleet boats, three (PC 558, PC 626, and PC 477) with scratching German and Japanese midget subs, two (PC 545 and PC 627) with killing Italian torpedo boats, and two (PC 1129 and PC 1123) with stopping Japanese suicide boats.

“USS PC 565 shown a short time after sinking German U-boat, U-521, with a depth charge, only the Commanding Officer escaped. The vessel fell away from his feet as he climbed out of the conning tower, June 2, 1943.” 80-G-78408

When it comes to the butcher’s bill, six PC-461 class sisters were lost to a combination of enemy action and accidents during WWII while another 24 were seriously damaged.

Meet PC-823

Laid down by the Leathern D. Smith Shipbuilding Company, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, on 8 November 1943, USS PC-823 was launched the following January and commissioned on 24 July 1944. The yard was very busy, cranking out Type N3 and Type C1 Liberty ships, Tacoma-class patrol frigates, and net layers besides 42 PC-461s.

Smith Shipbuilding in 1944, with at least eight PCs under varying stages of construction. Today the yard is run by the Fincantieri Marine Group and builds LCSs and the Navy’s new Constellation-class frigates. (Photo: Andy Laurent, Greenbay Route)

PC-843, early after her commissioning, likely still on the Great Lakes in the summer of 1944. via the Historical Collections of the Great Lakes.

War!

Assigned to the western Atlantic during the tale-end of World War II, apparently assigned to air-sea rescue duties, PC-823 doesn’t have a page in DANFS nor any war diaries/history on file with the NARA, but it is known that she was in Bermuda on VJ Day.

She did not earn any battle stars and was decommissioned on 11 February 1946, custody transferred to the Maritime Commission for further use, while retained on the Navy List.

King’s Point

With the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point on Long Island losing the series of loaned tall ships it had used for training during the war, the low-mileage PC-823 was disarmed, painted a gleaming white and transferred on 18 May 1948 for use as a training ship.

Rather than pick up the now-traditional name of TS Kings Pointer, she was instead re-named Ensign Whitehead, in honor of one of the alumni of the USMMA who had been lost during the war while serving with the Navy.

Via the King’s Point Alumni Association:

The Wall of Honor includes the name of Fredrick Cowper Whitehead, Jr., a Kings Pointer who graduated on December 24, 1943. Soon after graduation, he was sworn in as an Ensign, USNR. On January 27, 1944, he was assigned to the USS Lansdale (DD 426), currently operating in the Mediterranean. Whitehead reported aboard the Lansdale on March 26 in Oran. The ship was serving as a convoy escort with radio jamming equipment intended to thwart German radio-guided bombs.

On April 20, about two dozen German bombers attacked the convoy. The bombs and torpedoes hit the SS Paul Hamilton. Silhouetted by the explosion of the SS Paul Hamilton, the Lansdale became the target of the second and third wave of bombers. The torpedoes struck the Lansdale in the starboard engine room, where Whitehead was on watch. The ship ultimately foundered and the Captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. A count of the survivors showed 47 men, including Fredrick Whitehead Jr., as missing and presumed dead.

Ensign Whitehead, USNR was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the European-African-Middle East Area Campaign Medal. Based on his service as a Cadet/Midshipman, he was also awarded the Atlantic War Zone Bar, the Mediterranean-Middle East War Zone Bar, the Victory Medal, and a Presidential Testimonial Letter.

However, the USMMA soon found better ships available for use and by the end of 1949, she was laid up at the Academy, pending disposal.

Meanwhile, in Korea…

The South Korean Navy (Daehan-minguk Haegun) was formed on 11 November 1945 as the “Maritime Affairs Association” (Haebangbyeongdan) in the American-occupied zone of the formerly Japanese-occupied Korea. As such, it is the senior service of the Republic, with the ROK Army not formed until 1948 and the ROKAF in 1949. Numbering just 70 members led by former merchant mariner Sohn Won Yil, it inherited a series of small coastal craft at the former IJN yard at Jinhae and served in a brown water coast guard role with a modicum of American support until South Korea became independent in August 1948. It was then that it morphed into the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN), with now-Admiral Sohn becoming its first CNO.

By early 1950, the force had grown to 7,500– including 1,200 ROK Marines. Its naval list counted 11 former Japanese Cha-1 class 85-foot wooden-hulled auxiliary submarine chasers (the Daejeon class in Korean service), two slow 13-knot 140-foot Japanese-designed gunboats (Chungmugong I & II) left incomplete on the ways at Jinhae that were finished in 1947, as well as 17 YMS-type small minesweepers (dubbed the Kang jim or Geumgangsan class in Korean service, with MSC pennant numbers) from the U.S. Navy. The largest weapons were single-barreled 40mm Bofors fitted on the YMSs in place of their original 3″/50s.

Between 1947 and 1950, the backbone of the nascent ROKN was 17 136-foot wooden-hulled coastal minesweepers transferred from the U.S. Navy. The first two are seen here, Geumgangsan (MSC 501) ex-YMS354; and Gyeongju (MSC-502) ex-YMS358. Of the 17 transferred, two defected to the DPRK in the late 1940s, two were lost at sea, and two were lost to mines in 1950. Those left would remain in service into the 1970s.

In short, it was still firmly a near-shore operation. Their primary concern was to clear the thousands of sea mines left over in their local waters dating as far back as 1904, police against Chinese pirates, and keep roaming Japanese fishing boats away.

By late 1949 the five-year-old ROKN felt it was ready for some blue water, or at least some green water, ships.

Headed Home

The solution for the cash-strapped force was to hit everyone’s paycheck for seed money which would be augmented by selling scrap metal left over from the war, officer’s wives tending laundry, and donations from lawmakers including President Syngman Rhee himself.

As detailed in a February 1950 edition of Time magazine:

A year ago a group of Korean enlisted men at Navy headquarters in Seoul got the idea of chipping in each month to buy a man-o’-war. They sounded out Commander in Chief Admiral Sohn Won Yil, who promptly queried his base commanders to see what their enlisted men thought of the idea. They liked it.

Soon afterward 5% of each enlisted man’s $10 a month and 10% of each officer’s pay was deducted to fill the purchase kitty. Meanwhile, Korea’s ambassador to Washington was told to start looking for a ship. Last September Korea’s government plunked down $18,000 of hard-won cash to buy a sturdy little 175-ft. patrol craft, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy’s training ship Ensign Whitehead.

Some 16 hand-picked officers, led by Captain (future CNO) Park Ok-gyu, were flown to New York and then spent two weeks at King’s Point getting the gist of how to run their new sub-chaser. With their ship moored at Harbor Boat Building Company’s yard, the officers invested sweat equity into a new coat of haze gray and a new hull number, PC-701. Shifted to the USCG’s Pier 8 (Rector Street) in New York on Christmas Eve, custody was transferred on 26 December 1949 in a small ceremony that included the South Korean Ambassador (and future prime minister) Chang Myon.

The ROKS Baekdusan, named for the highly revered Baekdu (Paektusan) or “white-head mountain,” was Korean.

Fantail of the Baekdusan the day the ship transferred from the USN to the RoK Navy in 1949, with ROKN officer raising the Taegeukgi. (RDML Lauren McReady, USMS – Lauren McReady Collection, American Merchant Marine Museum, Kings Point, NY.)

Spending New Year in Miami and transiting the Panama Canal, the little ship put into Hawaii on 24 January where one 3 anti-aircraft gun and six .50 caliber machine guns, authorized for transfer by the Secretary of Defense, were installed at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

Leaving Pearl for Korea on 20 March 1950, she stopped briefly at Guam to purchase a whopping 100 3-inch shells and fuel from the U.S. Navy base there before heading to South Korea. When she arrived at Jinhae Bay on 10 April, she was the first significant warship under Korean control since the country’s Joseon-era navy was disbanded in 1905.

Note the Taegeukgi stenciled on her wheelhouse

Photo of the 60-strong crew of the Baekdusan ship taken at Jinhae Pier 2 on 20 May 1950. Note the mix of American-style officer’s khakis and blues balanced by Japanese-style jumpers and flat caps for the ratings. 

And just in time, too, because then came…

Another War!

When the North Koreans unleashed their military against their neighbors to the South, Baekdusan earned the distinction of sinking a 1,000-ton Soviet-supplied transport ship that was trying to destroy the Pusan Port wharf facilities in the Korean Strait.

Vectored to the mystery ship in the late hours of 25 June, she chased it down between the Oryukdo Lighthouse and the Tsushima Lighthouse and began hailing it repeatedly to stop. Closing to within 90 meters of the interloper, the two ships soon began exchanging fire, swapping 3-inch shells for incoming 85mm shells and heavy machine gun fire from the Nork vessel. After a four-hour running fight, in which Baekdusan fired 50 shells before her main gun seized up, the black smoke-belching mystery ship sank at 0:30 a.m. on 26 June, reportedly carrying some 600 highly-trained North Korean commandos of the 766th Independent Infantry Regiment with it to the bottom.

Baekdusan, riddled with shrapnel and machine gun hits, suffered four wounded and two– Private First Class Kim Chang-hak and Private First Class Jeon Byeong-ik– killed.

Battle of the Korea Strait (Photo source: War Memorial of Korea, Korean Cultural Information Service)

Has Pusan been wrecked by a battalion-sized assault on the first day of the war, the 400,000 shells and 2.5 million rounds of ammo landed there by USAT Sgt. George D. Keathley and USNS Cardinal O’Connell on 28 June, followed by the 24th Infantry Division starting on 3 July, probably wouldn’t have happened. Had that not occurred, the war may have been lost in the first month.

As detailed by Samuel J. Cox, Director NHHC:

The “Battle of the Korea Strait,” as the ROKN would call it, had major strategic importance. At the time, the port of Pusan was very poorly defended. Had the North Korean surprise operation succeeded, the outcome of the war might have been very different, because by the beginning of August, Pusan was the last remaining port in South Korea that had not fallen to the North Koreans. It would be the only initial entry point for the U.S. forces that prevented the North Koreans from overrunning the entire Korean Peninsula.

She would go on to perform yeoman work for the rest of the war, including at the pivotal Inchon Landings (Operation Chromite) in September.

Inchon Invasion, September 1950. The first wave of U.S. Marines headed for the landing beach in LCVPs, on 15 September 1950. This landing is probably on Red Beach, on the northern side of the Inchon invasion area. PC at the far right is a unit of the Republic of Korea Navy. NH 96877

Ultimately, the U.S. Navy transferred another five PC-461s to the ROKN during the war– no cash required! These included ex-PC 799 (Geumgangsan), ex-PC 802 (Samgaksan), ex-PC 810 (Jirisan), ex-PC 485 (Hanlasan), and ex-PC 600 (Myohyangsan), added to the South Korean naval list as PC-702 through 705. Of these, Jirisan was sunk by a mine off Wonsan in 1951 while Hanlasan was later lost in a typhoon.

Kum Kang San/Geumgangsan (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-799) At the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 June 1950, following transfer to the South Korean Navy. She is flanked by her sister ships Chiri San/Jirisan (Korean PC-704) to the left and Sam Kak San/Samgaksan (Korean PC-703) to the right. USS Polaris (AF-11) is in the right background. Note men working on a 3″/50 dual-purpose gun mounted on Kum Kang San’s foredeck as well as American ensigns from the mainmast and small Taegeukgi on the bridge wings. NH 85494

Kum Kang San/Geumgangsan P-702 (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-799) with her Taegeukgi flying off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 17 June 1950, following transfer to the South Korean Navy. NH 85482

Chiri San/Jirisan P-704 (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-810) underway off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, 17 June 1950, with her Taegeukgi in the wind following transfer to the South Korean Navy. NH 85490

Sam Kak San/Samgaksan (Korean Submarine Chaser, # 703, formerly USS PC-802). The crew fires the ship’s 3″/50 gun “at the Communist-led North Koreans along the west coast of Korea” (quoted from the original caption). The photograph is dated 18 December 1951. Note the American kapok life jackets, Army OD fatigues, and M1 helmets. NH 97332

Baekdusan along with sisters Geumgangsan and Samgaksan, were decommissioned on 1 July 1959, due to corrosion and the general aging of the ships. Myohyangsan, found to be in better condition, was retained. 

The ROK Navy’s 173s via the 1960 edition of Janes

The three stricken subchasers were soon stripped of usable equipment and scrapped, their place on the ROKN naval list taken by three newly transferred sisterships: ex-USS Winnemucca (PC 1145), ex-USS Grosse Pointe (PC 1546), and ex-USS Chadron (PC 564) giving the South Koreans a four-pack of PC-461s on patrol into 1975, by which time they were replaced by a six-pack of larger (1500-ton, 306-foot) Rudderow-class destroyer escorts.

Epilogue

The “disposable” PC-461 class, besides the U.S. and ROK navies, served under the flags of more than 20 other countries. They remained in service around the globe until the late 1980s when the last two in active, ex-USS Susanville (PC 1149) and ex-USS Hanford (PC 1142), were retired by Taiwan.

Some 40,000 bluejackets sailed on the PCs during the “Big Show” and immediately after. The chronicle of their war is the 400-page PC Patrol Craft of World War II: A History of the Ships and Their Crews by William J. Veigele, a former PC sailor, first published in 1998.

It’s a good read if you can find it

The class is remembered by the Patrol Craft Sailor Association.

Several relics endure of Baekdusan.

Her main mast was installed at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy in 1965 and is preserved there, as is her 3″/50.

Her plans are in the U.S. National Archives.

The two ROKN bluejackets killed on Baekdusan that night in June 1950 had their names given to new Yoon Youngha class missile boats, ROKS Kim Changhak (PKG-727) and ROKS Jeon Byeongik (PKG-732).

ROKS Kim Changhak (PKG-727)

The ROKN very much remembers their story and that of their ship.

Today, the ROKN has grown to over 70,000 personnel and operates 160 vessels, putting it squarely as one of the largest and most modern naval forces on the planet.

The country’s first flat-top, the 45,000-ton Kyunghyang CVX-class lightning carrier, is planned to be named after the humble Baekdusan and her fearless crew.

The motto of the ROK Navy is 바다로, 세계로 (badalo, segyelo= To the sea, to the world).

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, July 10, 2024: Priceless Cargo

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, July 10, 2024: Priceless Cargo

U.S. Navy photograph, 80-G-276964, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Above we see the Bouge-class escort carrier USS Copahee (CVE-12) underway outbound from Garapan anchorage off Saipan on 8 July 1944, some 80 years ago this month, bound for San Diego where she would arrive on the 28th. Her deck cargo is interesting, and on closer look:

Show a load of captured Japanese planes– some never before seen in the West– to be used for intelligence and training purposes. This invaluable cache would prove a boon to Allied intelligence and some of these aircraft remain as a legacy of the war in the Pacific today.

It was all in a day’s work for Copahee, who reliably shipped aircraft around the theater by the thousands during her un-sung career.

About the Bogues

With both Great Britain and the U.S. running desperately short of flattops in the first half of World War II, and large, fast fleet carriers taking a while to crank out, a subspecies of light and “escort” carriers, the first created from the hulls of cruisers, the second from the hulls of merchant freighters, were produced in large numbers to put a few aircraft over every convoy and beach in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Of the more than 122 escort carriers produced in the U.S. for use by her and her Allies, some 45 were of the Bogue class. Based on the Maritime Commission’s Type C3-S-A1 cargo ship hull, these were built in short order at Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, and by the Western Pipe and Steel Company of San Francisco.

Some 496 feet overall with a 439-foot flight deck, these 16,200-ton ships could only steam at a pokey 16 ish knots sustained speed, which negated their use in fleet operations but allowed them to more than keep up with convoys of troop ships and war supplies. Capable of limited self-defense with four twin Bofors and up to 35 20mm Oerlikons for AAA as well as a pair of 5-inch guns for defense against small boats, they could carry as many as 28 operational aircraft in composite air wings. They were equipped with two elevators, Mk 4 arresting gear, and a hydraulic catapult.

Most of the Bogue class (34 of 45) went right over to the Royal Navy via Lend-Lease, where they were known as the Ameer, Attacker, Ruler, or Smiter class in turn, depending on their arrangement. However, the U.S. Navy did keep 11 of the class for themselves (USS Bogue, Card, Copahee, Core, Nassau, Altamaha, Barnes, Breton, Croatan, Prince William, and our very own Block Island), all entering service between September 1942 and June 1943.

Meet Copahee

Our subject was the only warship named for the small sound of the South Carolina coast, by the naming convention for the rest of her class. Launched 21 October 1941 by Todd-Pacific Shipyards, Tacoma, as a C3-S-A1 cargo ship SS Steel Architect under a Maritime Commission contract, she was acquired by the Navy almost two months to the day after Pearl Harbor– 8 February 1942– and commissioned as an Aircraft Escort Vessel, AVG-12 just two weeks after the Battle of Midway on 15 June 1942.

USS Copahee (ACV-12) underway off Port Angeles, Washington, on 30 August 1942. 80-G-11503.

Her war diary notes that she was the first American escort carrier commissioned on the West Coast. It also notes that her original cargo ship nameplate, Steel Architect, was still on her bow at the time.

Her hull number designation was changed to ACV-12 as an Auxiliary Aircraft Carrier on 20 August 1942 and to CVE-12, an escort carrier, on 15 July 1943, but this was all academic as she was already deployed for both of these changes.

War!

Once she joined the fleet, Copahee was placed under the direct command of ComAirPac, which she would serve until May 1944 when she transferred to ComCarTransRonPac.

USS Copahee (ACV-12) off Puget Sound Navy Yard on 17 August 1942. Note the barrage balloons aloft in the background. NH 55384

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Mess Attendants manning a 20mm machine gun, in a gun tub beside the flight deck, 9 September 1942. The carrier was then en route from Alameda, California, to the southwest Pacific. 80-G-71586

Sailing with TG 2.16, her first cruise was to Noumea in September 1942 with a load of 59 carrier aircraft. She then, escorted by TG 63.8 including three destroyers and the cruiser USS Helena, carried 20 desperately-needed F4F Wildcats of MAG 14 (VMF-121) to within launching distance of Guadalcanal on 9 October, where they flew off to Henderson Field.

This group was led by Major Joseph “Joe” J. Foss, who, flying his Wildcat from Henderson, shot down his first Japanese A6M Zero just four days later. Within a month, he had accounted for 23 “kills” over Guadalcanal with the “Cactus Air Force.”

Commander of VMF-121, Maj. Joe Foss (fourth from left resting his chin on his fist) stands with some of his pilots next to their F4F Wildcat fighters on Henderson Field.

Sent back to the rear without any aircraft, Copahee would be on hand for carrier aviator quals off the Coast of California and Hawaii for the rest of 1942, then in January 1943 would get back into the business of shuttling aircraft (as many as 80 at a time between deck cargo and hangar), aircrews, ordnance, engines, and equipment from the West Coast to the front lines, alternating with carrier landing qualifications/refreshers whenever she came back home.

A U.S. Marine Corps Vought F4U-1 Corsair of Marine Fighting Squadron 213 (VMF-213) Hell Hawks is warming up for a fight from the flight deck of the escort carrier USS Copahee (ACV-12), on 29 March 1943. Date 29 March 1943. National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.7154.022

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, 9 May 1943. Note the deck load of SBD and PV-1 planes. She would also carry the PV-1s of VB-144 to NAS Kaneohe, Hawaii. Upon arrival, the squadron began an intensive period of combat training and operational patrols over the ocean near the Hawaiian Islands before shifting to Tarawa. Copahee would also later carry PV-1-equipped VPB-148 from NAS Moffett Field, California to Hawaii in May 1945. 19-N-46207

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, 9 May 1943. Stern view. 19-N-46208

Same as the above, 19-N-46204

Starboard, same location and date as the above. 19-N-46205

USS Copahee passing under the Golden Gate Bridge on her way out to sea on 15 July 1943. Mare Island photo # 5188-43.

Unloading SBDs to barge from USS Copahee (CVE 12) at Midway Island, May 21, 1943. 80-G-88086

Changing colors on USS Copahee (CVE 12) upon arriving at Townsville, Australia, September 25, 1943. 80-G-88137

An Army P-40 after being unloaded from USS Copahee (CVE 12) at Townsville, Australia, before being taken to the Air Depot, September 27, 1943. 80-G-88121

Brisbane, Australia, 11 March 1944. Army P-38 (Lightning) on the flight deck of USS Copahee (CVE-12). The carrier departed San Francisco, California, on 22 February and remained in Brisbane until 13 March.

She also brought back things from her travels.

Copahee in the summer of 1943 shipped a captured A6M3 Model 32 Zero-Sen (Hamp/Hap) (MSN 3030, Q-102), late of the 582nd Kokutai, which had been inherited by U.S. Army troops at Buna in December 1942, back to the states.

An abandoned Mitsubishi A6M3 Model 32 Zero fighter. It was flown by Lieutenant Junior Grade Kazuo Tsunoda stationed at Buna base, New Guinea. The plane made a crash landing after being damaged by a USAAF Bell P-39 Airacobra on 26 August 1942. This aircraft, with V-187 and V-190, were captured and Buna and used by Allied forces. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.159.030

9 April 1944, Copahee in her new camo scheme at San Diego, from her War History

Across the first half of June 1944, she would serve as a replacement carrier for Task Force 58, conducting operations off Saipan until the 16th– directly supporting the mission up close and in real-time. In this, she shuttled 124 carrier aircraft to fleet carriers.

It was at Saipan’s Aslito airfield that American troops captured a motherlode of aircraft and assets left behind by the Japanese Imperial Navy. These would include over a dozen late-model A6M Zekes of the 261st Kokutai and a scratch-and-dent Kate.

Aslito Airfield, June-July 1944. Japanese Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” on Saipan at Aslito airfield. 80-G-307726

Recognizing the importance of this cache, the Navy’s Technical Air Intelligence Unit – Pacific Ocean Areas (TAIU-POA) wanted it all and soon the Navy’s go-to transport carrier was inbound from Eniwetok, arriving off Charan Kanoa, Saipan on the morning of 7 July then leaving the next day bound for San Diego.

This mix included at least 13 Zeke variants including several that would later be made flyable: A6M2 (MSN 5352), A6M5 (MSN 5356), A6M5 (MSN 5350), A6M5 Model 52 (MSN 4340), A6M5 Model 52 (MSN 1303), A6M5 (MSN 2193, 61-608), A6M5 (MSN 4361,61-131) and A6M5 Model 52 Zero (MSN 5357, 61-120). The cargo also included the first Nakajima B5N2 (Kate) Type 97 Carrier Attack Bomber (MSN 2194, tail-code KEB-306), a specimen of the 931st Kaigun, along with an assortment of spare parts that included 37 engines and “2,000 cubic feet of Japanese general aviation gear.”

4320 on USS Copahee belowdecks

The aircraft soon made their way into ONI publications and were widely exhibited across the country.

“ONI Know Your Enemy” Zeke 61-131 from Copahee

“ONI Know Your Enemy” Kate from Copahee

Zeke 4340 TAIC 7 1946 Victory parade, Wright Field

After unloading her cargo and receiving a short yard period to address repairs, Copahee was back at it, leaving Alameda on 4 September 1944 with a load of new aircraft headed to Hawaii.

In late October 1944, she carried several carrier aircraft late of the CVG-81 from USS Hancock, including the entirety of VA-174– equipped with SB2C-3 Helldivers — from Hawaii to Guam where USS Wasp would embark them for the Philippine campaign. In March 1945, Copahee would again carry VA-174 and CVG-81 elements, this time for transit back to the States.

Besides her ferry work, she conducted over 3,000 carrier qualification launches during her six periods tasked as a West Coast training carrier during the war, sadly resulting in two pilot fatalities. At least 710 aviators logged landings on Copahee.

From commissioning through VJ Day, Copahee steamed 249,638 miles (keep in mind this was usually at 12-14 knots), transporting an amazing 2,232 aircraft and 13,719 passengers. She was underway some 67 percent of her career.

Take a look at the variety in the 657 aircraft that she carried just in the first six months of 1945:

She also carried an immense amount of avgas and ordnance to forward areas. For instance, 769,000 gallons were delivered to Hawaii in 1944 alone.

Early model Mark XIII torpedo after bodies on USS Copahee CVE-12 Oct 29, 1943. She delivered no less than 147 torpedoes to forward areas from the West Coast

Ordnance delivered is staggering from one little 16,000-ton jeep carrier:

Another interesting facet of her War History is the evolution of her armament:

At the end of the war found Copahee at Hunters Point undergoing yard repairs. She then spent the rest of the war on “Magic Carpet” duty, returning homeward-bound servicemen from Saipan, Guam, Eniwetok, and the Philippines to the west coast.

She began deactivation at Alameda on 21 December 1945 and was decommissioned and placed in reserve with Tacoma’s mothball fleet on 5 July 1946.

Copahee received one battle star for World War II service, for the capture and occupation of Saipan in June 1944.

On 1 March 1959, while laid up, she was redesignated an Escort Helicopter Aircraft Carrier, and her hull number changed on paper to CVHE 12. Stricken sometime after, she was sold for scrap in 1961.

Of the rest of the Bogue class, USS Block Island (CVE-21) along with British-operated sister HMS Nabob (D 77) were lost to German U-boats during the war. Likewise, the same could be said for sistership HMS Thane (D 48) would be so crippled by U-1172 in 1945 that she was not returned to service.

As for the class’s post-war service, they were too small and slow to be utilized as much more than aircraft transports, and most of the British-operated vessels were returned to the U.S. Navy, retrograded back to merchantmen, and sold off as freighters.

Of the ten U.S.-operated Bogues, most were sold for scrap or for further mercantile use sans flattop and guns, with Card, converted to an aviation transport (AKV-40, later T-AKV-40) in the 1950s, remaining in service into Vietnam where she was embarrassingly holed by Viet Cong sappers in Saigon. The last of the class in American service, she was scrapped in 1971.

The final Bogue hull, the former Smiter-class escort carrier HMS Khedive (D62), continued operating as the tramp freighter SS Daphne as late as 1976 before she met her end in the hands of Spanish breakers.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Copahee. Her War History and diaries are in the National Archives.

Her bell is supposedly on loan by the NHHC to a school in California, although some say it may have since gotten out into private hands and has been spotted as a yard ornament.

Photo via Navsource

The U.S. Navy has yet to reissue her name.

Her 16 war dead, lost to accidents in high-tempo operations, are remembered on a plaque installed at the National Museum of the Pacific War.

Meanwhile, at least one of the A6M5 Model 52s (MSN 4340, 61-131) she brought back to the West Coast in July 1944 is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collection.

Mitsubishi A6M5 Reisen (Zero Fighter) Model 52 ZEKE (A19600335000) at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. Photo taken by Eric Long. Photo taken on December 29. 2016. (A19600335000.3T8A4453) (A19600335000-NASM2018-10400)

A second A6M5, (MSN 5357, 61-120) remained in flyable condition as N46770 until very recently and appeared in several scenes of 2001’s Pearl Harbor. She is in the collection of the Planes of Fame Air Museum, Chino.

The others have been lost to history.

Joe Foss made it off of Guadalcanal, received the Medal of Honor from FDR personally, and later became a brigadier general in the Air National Guard after the war. Turning to politics, he became the 20th Governor of South Dakota in 1955 and passed in 2003, aged 87.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, July 3, 2024: Brace for Ramming

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, July 3, 2024: Brace for Ramming

U.S. Navy photograph, 80-G-700007, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Above we see, just south-east of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the mine-filled shattered bow of the German Type XB U-boat, U-233, pointing to the sky just before plunging to the bottom after the submarine was rammed by the Cannon-class destroyer escort USS Thomas (DE 102) some 80 years ago this week– 5 July 1944. The unlucky U-233 was on her first combat patrol, tasked with sowing mines off key Canadian and American harbors.

She never made it that far and was one of Thomas’s three U-boat kills during the war.

And that was just in the destroyer escort’s first career.

What were the Cannons?

USS Cannon (DE-99) Dravo builder’s photo. USN CP-DE-99-19-N-51457

The Cannon class, ordered in 1942 to help stem the tide of the terrible U-boat menace in the Atlantic, was also known as the DET type from their Diesel Electric Tandem drive. The DET’s substitution for a turbo-electric propulsion plant was the primary difference from the predecessor Buckley (“TE”) class. The DET was in turn replaced with a direct drive diesel plant to yield the design of the successor Edsall (“FMR”) class.

Besides a heavy ASW armament, these humble ships carried a trio of Mk.22 3″/50s, some deck-mounted torpedo tubes to be effective against larger surface combatants in a pinch, and a smattering of Bofors/Oerlikon AAA mounts.

In all, although 116 Cannon-class destroyer escorts were planned, only 72 were completed. Some of her more well-known sisters included the USS Eldridge, the ship claimed to be a part of the infamous Philadelphia Experiment. The vessels were all cranked out in blocks by four yards with Thomas— along with class leaders Cannon and Bostwick— among the nine produced by Dravo.

Meet Thomas

Our subject was the second warship named for LT Clarence Crase Thomas (USNA 1908). A son of Grass Valley, California, Thomas served pre-war in the USS Maryland (ACR-8), USS Yorktown (PG-1), USS Denver (C-14), USS Cleveland (C-19), USS West Virginia (ACR-5), and battleship USS Florida. Once the U.S. entered the Great War, he was detailed to command the naval armed guard det on the merchant steamship SS Vacuum in April 1917.

Lost to a German U-boat just two weeks later, Thomas was the first U.S. naval officer to lose his life in the war with Germany and was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

His name was almost immediately issued to a Wickes-class destroyer (DD-182) then under construction, and sponsored by LT Thomas’s widow, Evelyn. That four-piper flush deck greyhound was decommissioned in 1922 and laid up until 1940, then transferred to the Royal Navy as part of the “bases for destroyers” deal, becoming first the Town-class destroyer, HMS St Albans (I15), then the Free Norwegian Navy’s HNoMS St Albans, and finally the Soviet destroyer Dostoyny/Dostojnyj before being scrapped in 1949.

Meanwhile, our subject, the second Thomas, DE-102, was laid down on 16 January 1943 by Dravo and commissioned on 21 November 1943 at Portsmouth, her build time spanning just 310 days.

War!

Assigned to Escort Division 48 as flagship, she was surrounded by five sisters– USS Bostwick, Breeman, Bronstein, Baker, and Coffman. Her shakedown took place off the East Coast and she spent the Christmas 1943/New Year’s 1944 holiday in Bermuda.

07 December 1943: Portsmouth, Va. – A starboard quarter view of Thomas taken near the Norfolk Navy Yard. U.S. Navy photo #CP-DE-102-19-N-60229

Her first bite at Dönitz’s grey sharks came as part of the hunter-killer group attached to the jeep carrier USS Block Island (CVE-21) for six weeks in February-March 1944. This included the 1 March 1944 kill north of the Azores of a submarine credited by the Navy as the Type VIIC U-boat U-709 (Oblt. (R) Rudolf Ites), sunk with all hands. Alternatively, some reports hold this was actually U-441, which was severely damaged but escaped.

Then came a stint riding shotgun on Convoy UGS 39 and its return (GUS 39) from the U.S. to the Med.

Then came more hunter-killer taskings.

USS Thomas was taken on 5 July 1944 from the escort carrier USS Card (CVE-11). 80-G-366262

On 5 July 1944, sisters Thomas (DE-102) and USS Baker (DE-190), from the jeep carrier USS Card’s hunter-killer force (Task Group 22.5), ran U-233 (Kptlt. Hans Steen) to ground off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The action began at 1910 when Baker picked up a sound contact at 1,500 yards.

Just 17 minutes and two depth charge patterns later, a submarine’s bow broke the surface and Baker took the enemy boat under surface fire, with Thomas closing in and opening up with her deck guns shortly after. The end came when Thomas rammed the shell-riddled U-boat on its starboard side just aft of the fairweather. By 1947 it was all over and the tin cans were plucking survivors from the water.

From the 12-page report filed by LCDR David M. Kellog, Thomas’s skipper:

A great series of shots captured from Thomas show the last dive of U-233.

German U-Boat, U-233, sinks as it is rammed. 80-G-700006

80-G-700005

Thomas picked up 20 of U-233’s 69-man crew, including Kptlt. Steen, who later died of wounds. The survivors, along with two Enigma coding wheels recovered from the pockets of one of the men, were transferred to Card.

Interrogations later revealed U-233’s mission and her cargo of 66 new type Drückunterschiedsmine (pressure differential mines) along with four T-5 and three G7e torpedoes, none of which the boat had a chance to use.

As far as Thomas was concerned, she suffered only minor damage from her ramming kill, chiefly in two flooded peak tanks and a leaking chain locker. Proceeding to Boston Navy Yard for repairs, she was back on duty by 18 July and spent the next six weeks shepherding new submarines out of Portsmouth and Groton undergoing shakedown in Long Island Sound.

USS Thomas (DE-102) underway while supporting submarine operations off the U.S. East Coast, 21 August 1944. Note the track of a torpedo that is passing under the ship. The ship is painted in Camouflage Measure 32, Design 3D. Her hull number is painted atop the front of her bridge to assist identification by aircraft. NH 107610

September 1944 found her back with the Card hunter-killer group, surviving hurricane-force winds at least twice at sea before the end of the year as the task group roamed the stormy North Atlantic.

She would continue to serve with the Card group into 1945, alternating going to the rescue of sinking ships and chasing down sonar contacts. On 30 April 1945, Thomas, along with the frigate Natchez (PF-2), and sisterships Coffman and Bostwick, came across what is cited by the Navy as the advanced Type IXC/40 U-boat U-548 just east of Cape Hatteras but is now generally believed to be sister U-879 (Kptlt. Erwin Manchen), sending her to the bottom with all 52 hands.

Post VE-Day, Thomas would spend the next four months in a series of exercises before she was detailed to New York to take part in the massive Navy Day celebrations there and in November was tasked to escort the infamous Type IXC/40 U-boat U-530 (Oblt. Otto Wermuth), which had surrendered in Argentina two months after the end of the war in Europe.

Following a series of war bond tours with Thomas and U-530, the latter was utilized for a series of tests and deep-sixed in torpedo drills off Cape Cod.

USS Toro (SS-422) torpedoed the surrendered German submarine U-530, during tests 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Photo released 28 November 1947. Note the effects of torpedo explosion. 80-G-704668

However, by that time, Thomas had been decommissioned at Green Cove Springs, Florida, in March 1946 and added to the 500-strong mothball fleet that swayed at a series of 13 piers built there just for the purpose.

USS Thomas (DE-102) likely in Green Cove Springs, Florida. Photo by Ensign Carl Gene Coin, USN, via Wikimedia commons.

She was not even listed in that year’s Jane’s Fighting Ships entry for her class.

Jane’s 1946 listing for the 57-strong semi-active Bostwick class, noting numerous transfers to overseas allies.

Thomas received four battle stars for World War II service.

Plank owner LCDR Kellogg, who earned the Legion of Merit for the U-233 ramming and commanded the vessel throughout the war, faded into history and I cannot find any further information on him.

A long second life

While Thomas’s initial service would last just three years, others could desperately put the low-mileage destroyer escort to good use.

Ultimately 14 of the Cannon/Bostwick class went to France and Brazil during the war, followed by another eight to the French– who apparently really liked the type– four to Greece (including USS Slater which returned home in the 1990s to become the only destroyer escort afloat in the United States), three to Italy, two to Japan, six to the Dutch, three to Peru, five to the Philippines, two to South Korea, one to Thailand, and two to Uruguay.

When it comes to Thomas, she and three sisters: Bostwick, Breeman, and Carter, in a short ceremony on 14 December 1948, were transferred to Nationalist (Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT) China. Thomas became class leader Taihe (also seen in the West as ROCS Tai He and ROCS Tai Ho) with the hull/pennant number DE-23.

The four destroyer escorts were soon put into emergency use. During the last phase of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the 26 loyal ships of the ROCN engaged in the protection of supply convoys and the withdrawal of the Nationalist government and over 1 million refugees to Taiwan.

These ships were captured in great detail during this period in Nationalist use by LIFE magazine.

In this image, she still has her 3″/50 Mk22s up front

Fuzing 40mm Bofors rounds. Note the traditional crackerjack and flat cap used by the Nationalists

Crackerjacks combined with M1 helmets and US Navy Mk II talker helmets

The No. 3 mount now has an additional 3″/50 rather than the 40mm Bofors. Also, that is A LOT of depth charges for those 8 throwers and two rails! Ash cans a-go-go

Needing bigger guns for the work envisioned of them, the Chinese quickly upgraded their two forward 3-inchers to a pair of 5″/38 singles in open mounts, as well as substituting the stern 40mm mount for one of the same which gave the ships a 2+2 format with twin 5-inchers over the bow and a 5-inch over a 3-inch over the stern. 

The 1950s saw the fleet heavily involved in the pitched and tense engagements around Kinmen (Quemoy), Matsu, and the Yijiangshan and Dachen Islands in the Taiwan Straits as well as the clandestine Guoguang operations in which the KMT tried to retake the mainland by landing would-be guerilla organization teams in Red territory.

Taihe notably took part in the Battle of Pingtan Island in August 1949, covered the retreat from Hainan Island in April 1950, the Battle of the Wanshan Islands in May 1950 (where she is credited with sinking the gunboat Jiefang and the LCI Guishan), the running Battle of the Tohoku Islands where she escaped a trap set by six Red corvettes and frigates, damaging the Changsha (216)– formerly the Japanese Type D coastal defense ship No. 118– in the process; rescuing the torpedoed destroyer Taiping (DE-22, ex USS Decker DE-47) during the Battle of Yijiangshan Island in November 1954, and conducting a series of tense patrols in the Spratly Islands in 1956.

Propaganda shells fired into Red-controlled areas. By John Dominis LIFE

In all, Thomas and her three sisters continued to hold the front lines of the Taiwan Straits for 25 years and, for the first decade of that, were the most powerful assets available to the ROCN, a title they held until two Benson-class destroyers (USS Benson and USS Hilary P. Jones) were transferred in 1954.

They were also later fitted in the 1960s with Mk.32 12.75-inch ASW torpedo tubes for Mk 44s– which were a lot more effective than depth charges.

Taizhao, ex Carter anchored at the Kaohsiung Xinbin Wharf, late 1940s.

Jane’s 1973-4 listing for the Taiwan Bostwicks, including Carter.

As part of the pressure on Communist China at the tail end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Nixon administration transferred a huge flotilla of more advanced warships to Taiwan between late 1970 and early 1973 that included two GUPPY’d Tench-class submarines (one of which is still active), five Gearing-class destroyers, six Sumner-class destroyers, four Fletchers, and USS McComb (DD-458)— a late Gleaves-class destroyer that had been converted to a fast minesweeper. With all these “new-to-you” hulls, the long-serving destroyer escorts could be retired and, by the end of 1973, Thomas and her three sisters in Formosan service had been disposed of for scrap. 

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Thomas in the U.S. Her war history and diaries are in the National Archives.

A painting of Thomas ramming U-233 by maritime artist John G. Gromosiak of Cincinnati is in the U.S. Naval Museum at Annapolis but I can only find this small image of it, via Navsource.

The U.S. Navy has yet to recycle LT Thomas’s name for a third vessel, which is a shame.

Besides the museum ship USS Slater (DE-766), now sitting dockside in Albany New York, and the pier side training ship USS Hemminger (DE-746) (now HTMS Pin Klao DE-1) in Thailand, there are no Cannon-class destroyer escorts still afloat.

USS Slater is the only destroyer escort preserved in North America– and is Thomas’s sistership

The Destroyer Escort Sailors Association honors the men of all the DEs, regardless of class. Sadly, their 45th annual convention in 2020 was their last as their numbers are rapidly declining.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, June 26, 2024: A Tin Can with Teeth

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, June 26, 2024: A Tin Can with Teeth

Photograph by LT. L. Pelman, Admiralty Collection, Imperial War Museum catalog number A 20319.

Above we see a group of ratings aboard the Beagle class destroyer HMS Bulldog (H 91) with their mechanical mascot “which does everything but eat,” on 11 November 1943, at Portsmouth. Don’t let the clever lads and their tin pup fool you, Bulldog’s crew had already accomplished more in the war for the Atlantic than any other destroyer men would and, just six months after this image was snapped, add to their war record by bagging their second U-boat of the conflict.

The A/Bs

Moving on from their Great War-era tin cans, the Admiralty ordered a pair of modern destroyer prototypes in 1927– HMS Amazon (1,352 tons) and Ambuscade (1,173 tons), each capable of making 37 knots on oil-fired steam turbine plants and armed with four old-style BL 4.7″/45 Mk I dual purpose guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes.

HMS Amazon (D39) underway at sea in 1942. She and near sister HMS Ambuscade (D38) formed the basis for British destroyer designs from 1927 until the Tribal class was ordered in 1936. IWM FL 515.

The lessons learned from these two test vessels led to two runs of very similar ships, the 8-hull A class (Acasta, Achates, Active, Antelope, Anthony, Ardent, Arrow, and Acheron) along with a destroyer leader with room for a commodore (HMS Codrington), a second flight 8-hull B class (Basilisk, Beagle, Blanche, Boadicea, Boreas, Brazen, Brilliant and Bulldog) with corresponding destroyer leader (HMS Keith), and two further A’s for the RCN (HMCS Saguenay and Skeena). In all, some 20 ships.

The A/B class destroyers, from the 1931 Janes.

Powered by two Parsons geared steam turbines, each with their own shaft, using steam provided by three Admiralty water-tube boilers equipped with superheaters, these 1,350-ton (standard) 323-foot greyhounds were extremely fast, able to hit 35 knots. Armed with four more modern QF 4.7″/45cal Mk IX singles and a pair of quadruple 21-inch torpedo tubes, they could hold their own. Able to (kind of) sweep mines, they initially carried little ASW gear as, after all, when they were designed, the Versailles Treaty had barred Germany from making or owning U-boats. Of course, that would change.

Meet Bulldog

Our subject was the sixth HMS Bulldog (or HMS Bull Dog) in RN service in a tradition going back to 1794 that included two ships that fought the French, a steam-powered paddle sloop that saw hot service from Palermo to Haiti, an Ant-class gunboat in the last half of the 19th Century, and a Great War-era Beagle-class destroyer that struck Turkish mine off Gallipoli. This earned our destroyer five battle honors (Toulon 1793, St Lucia 1796, Baltic 1854-55, Dardanelles 1915-16, English Channel 1915-16) before she was even commissioned.

Ordered on 22 March 1929 under the 1928 Programme as Yard No. 1411 from Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd, Wallsend, the future HMS Bulldog (H91) was laid down on 10 August 1929, launched the following December, and completed on 8 April 1931 at £221,408.

Dispatched to join the 4th Destroyer Flotilla with the Mediterranean Fleet, Bulldog showed the flag, participated in fleet exercises, and came to the rescue of those affected by the 1932 Ierissos earthquake in Greece.

Bulldog in Venice, pre-war

Reassignment to the Home Fleet in September 1936 brought an almost non-stop series of tense patrols off the Spanish coast during the Civil War in that country, alternating with yard periods, for the next three years.

War!

When the declaration of war between Germany and Great Britain hit in September 1939, Bulldog was in Alexandria as escort and plane guard for the carrier HMS Glorious.

HMS Glorious November 1939 at Socotra in Yemen destroyer HMS Bulldog alongside

With German raiders and blockade runners at large in the Indian Ocean, a hunting group (Force J) consisting of Glorious, Bulldog, the destroyer HMS Daring, and the old battleship HMS Malaya was sent to those waters for the rest of the year.

April 1940 saw Bulldog join in the screen escorting the carriers Glorious and Ark Royal back to UK Home Waters for the Norwegian campaign, during which our destroyer was tasked with supporting other operations. It was shortly after she broke with the carriers that Bulldog came to the rescue of the torpedoed K-class destroyer leader HMS Kelly (F01)-– commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten– and towed the ship back to Tyne.

Assigned to the 1st Destroyer Flotilla for the evacuation of the BEF from France in June 1940 (Operation Cycle), Bulldog received three bomb hits off Le Harve on 10 June and had to spend the next three months in repair, returning to service in September with a raid with three other destroyers on the port of Cherbourg.

Convoy duties, Enigma, and Sub-busting

Bulldog then spent the rest of 1940 on escort and sheepdog duty. In February 1941, she was nominated for escort service in the Western Approaches and, between 17 March 1941 when she joined HG 055, and 14 March 1945 when she left MKS 087G, would ride shotgun on no less than 50 convoys.

While part of the 3rd Escort Group accompanying convoy OB 318, Bulldog, HMS Broadway, and the corvette HMS Aubretia engaged the German Type IXB submarine U-110 (Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp) east of Cape Farewell, Greenland on 9 May 1940.

After depth charging her to the surface a boarding party from Bulldog under SLt David Balme including stoker Cyril Lee, telegraphist Allen Long, and Able Seamen Sidney Pearce, Cyril Dolley, Richard Roe, Claude Wileman, Arnold Hargreaves and John Trotter, spent six hours aboard the sinking German submarine and managed to bag its intact Enigma machine, in its entirety, to include the prized current Kurzsignale preset codes book.

B Class Destroyer HMS Bulldog with U-110 in the background on May 9th, 1941

As detailed by the Independent in 2016:

They arrived soon after midday to windward of her. Balme clambered up her curved, slippery surface, and, revolver at the ready, mounted the fixed ladder of the 12ft conning tower. Going down inside, he had two hatches and more ladders to negotiate. It meant replacing the weapon in its holster to grip with both hands and descend bottom-first. If any Nazi crewman had stayed on board, he thought, I’m an easy target.

An eerie blue light bathed the U-boat’s nerve center in the chamber below, an array of unfamiliar wheels and dials. A hissing came from somewhere, and he could hear the ocean slosh against the hull. There might be booby traps; there might be scuttling charges set to explode. He went up to the bow: nothing; the stern, too, was empty.

He formed his men into a chain to pass out books and documents. They included a stoker, Cyril Lee, and a telegraphist, Allen Long. The stoker’s job, to restart the engines, proved too risky, but the telegraphist at once told Balme: “This looks like an interesting bit of equipment, Sir.” It resembled a typewriter but lit up strangely when Long pressed the keys. It was a German naval “Enigma” cipher machine. The party found daily settings and procedures for its use. Written in soluble ink, they risked being lost if dropped in the sea, but, Balme recalled: “Nothing even got wet.”

As noted by the National Museum of the Royal Navy, “This discovery was one of the greatest ever intelligence coups and undoubtedly saved thousands, if not millions, of lives.” No less a person than King George VI called the find “perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at sea.”

Balme received the Distinguished Service Cross while the other members of the away team were Mentioned in Despatches, and skipper CDR Addison Joe Baker-Cresswell, RN, received the Distinguished Service Order.

A party from HMS Bulldog prepares to board U-110. IWM HU63114

Bulldog kept U-110 afloat for 17 hours then let the towline slip, ordered to let the submarine go to the bottom to preserve the Enigma capture secret.

HMS Bulldog (H-91) moored to a buoy on the east coast, on 17 April 1945

Bulldog would also chalk up a solo kill against the Type VIIC U-boat U-719 (Oblt. Klaus-Dietrich Steffens) on 26 Jun 1944– 80 years ago today– north-west of Ireland. All hands were lost on the German boat.

Operation Nest Egg

It was aboard the cramped decks of our little destroyer that the nearly five-year German occupation of the Channel Islands ended. She was the headquarters ship for Force 135, Operation Nest Egg, commanded by Brigadier Alfred Ernest Snow, OBE, which was sent to liberate the islands.

A week after Hitler’s suicide, HMS Bulldog, escorted by her sister Beagle, arrived off St Peter Port in Guernsey and a declaration of unconditional surrender was signed t 0714 on 9 May 1945 by Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, deputy commander of the German garrison, after some back and forth between Brigadier Snow, chief of the British “Omelet” delegation, and one young Kapitänleutänant Armin Zimmerman, the aide to the garrison’s overall commander, Vizeadmiral Friedrich Hüffmeier, late of the KMS Scharnhorst.

The surrender party was transported by the German minesweeper M4613 to Bulldog.

A scene on board HMS Bulldog during the first conference with Captain Lieutenant Zimmerman before the signing of the surrender document which liberated the Channel Islands. Left to right around the table are: Admiral Stuart (Royal Navy), Brigadier General A E Snow (Chief British Emissary), Captain H Herzmark (Intelligence Corps), Wing Commander Archie Steward (Royal Air Force), Lieutenant Colonel E A Stoneman, Major John Margeson, Colonel H R Power (all of the British Army) and Kapitänleutänant Armin Zimmerman,(Kriegsmarine). IWM D24595

Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, German deputy commander of the Channel Islands (right), has his identification papers checked as arrives at HMS Bulldog to sign the document of surrender. IWM D 24601

Immediately after the surrender document was signed, the initial Allied force, led by Colonel H.R. Power and Lt.Col Stoneman and consisting of four officers and 21 men, including several from Guernsey, landed at the White Rock at 07:50, the first British forces on the island since June 1940.

Colonel H.R. Power, Chief Civil Affairs Officer, walking across the gangplank from German Harbor Protection Vessel FK04, about to shake the hand of Attorney-General J.E.L. Martel on the White Rock. The St. Peter Port seafront can be seen in the background. Approx. 7:50am, 9th May 1945 Guernsey Museum Object No. GMAG 2006.193.36

In all, the German garrisons in the Channel Islands numbered 26,909 men on 9 May (Jersey: 11,671, Guernsey: 11,755, Alderney: 3,202, and Sark: 281), which had kept a populace of some 40,000 locals under the thumb for a half-decade. Not a bad haul for a couple of worn-out tin cans.

Paid off shortly after, Bulldog earned two somewhat understated battle honors for her WWII service (Atlantic 1941-45 and Arctic 1942-44)

The war was hard on these ships. Of the 20 A/B-class destroyers, 13 were lost or crippled during WWII including Acasta and Ardent, sunk in a surface action with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Narvik while trying to defend HMS Glorious; Achates lost in the Barents in a one-sided fight with the German cruiser Admiral Hipper; Acheron and Blanche lost to mines, Arrow wrecked in an explosion in Algiers, Codrington and Brazen sunk by German bombers off Dover during the Battle of Britain, Skeena wrecked off Iceland, Keith and Basilisk claimed by the Luftwaffe during Dunkirk, and Boadicea sent sky high by Fritz X missiles fired by KG 100 Dornier Do 217s off Portsmouth a week after D-Day. Saguenay, who lost both her bow and stern in two different incidents, finished the war as an unpowered training hulk.

Of the seven remaining class members– Active, Antelope, Anthony, Beagle, Boreas, Brilliant, and our Bulldog— obsolete for postwar work and thoroughly worn out, they were soon paid off and scrapped by 1948.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Bulldog.

A set of her 1940 bomb damage repair plans are in the National Archives.

The IWM has two works of art in their collection with Bulldog as the subject.

This evacuation from France was remembered in a period watercolor by maritime artist Richard Harding Seddon.

Signaling HMS Bulldog from the Shore, near Veulette: 10th June 1940. a view of some British soldiers signaling from a beach to HMS Bulldog. The soldiers stand on an unusual white rock formation, the sunset casting long shadows across the beach. Art.IWM ART LD 5986

Bulldog and her sisters Beagle and Boadicea were also portrayed off Bear Island while on Arctic duty in 1943 in a painting by Colin McMillan.

Three Royal Navy destroyers sail in choppy Arctic waters near Bear Island (Bjørnøja), with HMS Boadicea in the immediate foreground. All the ships sail from left to right and beams of sunlight emerge from breaks in the cloud in the background. Art.IWM ART 16598

As for Enigma machine burglar David Edward Balme, naval officer, and wool broker, DSC 1941, he finished the war as an LCDR and later served in the cruiser HMS Berwick and the battle-cruiser HMS Renown before leaving the service in 1947. He died in Lymington, Hampshire 3 January 2016.

Bulldog’s skipper during the Enigma/U-110 capture, CDR Addison Joe Baker-Cresswell DSO, RN, left the service in 1951 having gone on to command the cruiser HMS Caradoc (D 60). A gentleman farmer, he passed in 1997, aged 96.

Post-war, the Royal Navy would recycle the name for the seventh HMS Bulldog (A317), the lead ship of her class of four 189-foot steel-hulled armed survey ships. Commissioned in 1968, she was the last of the four still in service– and the last active RN ship with a wooden deck– when she was paid off in 2002.

Built by Brooke Marine, Lowestoft, the Bulldogs sported a bulbous bow and a high flared forecastle, giving them rather yacht-like lines, in addition to their suite of echo sounders and a Marconi Hydrosearch sector scanning sonar.

The Admiralty in 2021 announced the names for the “Inspirational” Type 31 (Babcock Arrowhead 140) frigate class would include the eighth HMS Bulldog, which had her keel laid in 2023.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

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