HMS Atheling (D51): An American Carrier Borrowed to Keep Britain's Air Wings Moving

Born in Washington State as USS Glacier

HMS Atheling began her life as an American ship, built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation in Tacoma, Washington, under a US Maritime Commission contract. She was launched on 7 September 1942, sponsored by Mrs Richard P. Luker, and commissioned into the United States Navy on 12 July 1943 as USS Glacier, an escort carrier redesignated CVE-33 just three days later.

Her American service, however, was brief: she was transferred to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease programme on 31 July 1943 at Vancouver, converted at the Royal Canadian Navy dockyard in Esquimalt, and commissioned into British service as HMS Atheling on 28 October 1943, part of the Ruler class of escort carriers built specifically to be transferred to Britain.

The scale of this arrangement is the thing most people miss about the Royal Navy's carrier war. Britain received thirty-four escort carriers from the United States under Lend-Lease, of which twenty-three belonged to the Ruler class alone, and almost every escort carrier the Royal Navy operated was built in an American yard. There was simply no spare British capacity: the yards were full of destroyers, frigates, landing craft and merchant hulls, and an escort carrier is a large ship. So the Americans built them on merchant-ship lines, at a rate nobody else in the world could match, and handed them over.

She measured just over 492 feet in length, could carry up to 24 aircraft, and managed a modest 16.5 knots, entirely adequate for a ship whose war would be fought without ever firing a shot at an enemy.

Turning an American escort carrier into a Royal Navy one took real work: at the Burrard Dry Dock in North Vancouver she underwent around 150 separate alterations over 89 days, from a lengthened flight deck to reworked hangar space, controls and communications gear, before she was fit to fly British aircraft off a British deck.

The conversion work was not cosmetic tinkering. Nineteen of the twenty-three were reworked at Burrard Dry Dock in Vancouver to Royal Navy standards, and Atheling's hundred and fifty alterations in eighty-nine days is a fair sample of what that meant: a lengthened flight deck, rebuilt hangar arrangements, different arrester gear and barriers, British radio and radar, British firefighting and fuelling practice, and accommodation laid out the way a British ship's company expected to live. Two navies that spoke the same language had spent forty years developing entirely different habits, and every one of them had to be built back in by hand before she could work.

The Fleet's Delivery Service

From January 1944, Atheling took up the vital but entirely unglamorous role of ferrying entire Royal Navy air squadrons, aircrew and their aircraft eastward.

Ferrying is worth defending as a job, because it reads like a demotion and was nothing of the kind. An air squadron is not a set of aeroplanes: it is aircraft, aircrew, maintainers, tools, spares, manuals and a great deal of very specific equipment, and all of it has to arrive in the same place at the same time in working order. Fly the aircraft out separately and you have machines with nobody to fix them. A carrier could take the entire squadron as a unit, land it where it was needed and have it operational within days. The Eastern Fleet and later the British Pacific Fleet ran on exactly that, and ships like Atheling are the reason there were aircraft in the Indian Ocean to fly at all.

Her first delivery run carried 18 Corsairs of 1836 Naval Air Squadron across the Atlantic in the 24-ship convoy UT.6, sailing alongside her sister ship HMS Ameer and dropping her aircraft off at Belfast on 9 January 1944 before pressing on to join the Eastern Fleet.

By April she had reached Colombo, and spent the following months in the Indian Ocean with the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron, running fighter deliveries and deck landing training for a string of embarked squadrons.

Not every assignment suited her: earmarked for Operation Councillor in June 1944, she turned out to be some 12 knots slower than the ship she was meant to be working alongside, and had to be released from the task, a reminder that even a useful ferry carrier had firm limits.

The Operation Councillor episode is a neat illustration of the limits. Sixteen and a half knots is a merchant ship's speed, because underneath the flight deck she was a merchant ship, and a fleet carrier or a fast task group simply cannot slow down to accommodate that without becoming a target. Escort carriers went where the pace was set by convoys, not by battle groups. Being twelve knots slower than the ship she was supposed to work with was not a fault in Atheling. It was the entire design compromise showing itself in one afternoon.

What Councillor actually was is worth saying, because the article of faith about the Eastern Fleet in 1944 is that it did nothing much, and that is not quite fair. In June that year the Americans were about to land on Saipan, opening the Marianas campaign, and they asked the British in the Indian Ocean for a diversion: something visible enough to hold Japanese attention on the wrong side of the map while the landings went in. The operation was built round the fleet carrier Illustrious, with Atheling in company. She had been working in the Indian Ocean as a trade protection carrier since May and had ten Seafire IIIs of 889 Naval Air Squadron and ten Wildcats of 890 aboard. Then somebody did the arithmetic on her speed, and she was released from it.

There is no disgrace in that, and it says something about the whole strategic position. The Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean that summer was not strong enough to fight the Japanese for the Bay of Bengal and knew it. What it could do was look like a threat: sail, be seen, be reported, and make an enemy staff spend a week worrying about the wrong ocean. That is a perfectly respectable use of a fleet, and it needs numbers on the chart more than it needs speed. Atheling was one more flight deck in the order of battle right up to the moment it became obvious she could not keep station with the ship she was supposed to be guarding.

From December 1944 she was lent outright to the US Navy for ferry work in the Pacific, running aircraft out from San Diego to Pearl Harbor and Guam under American control.

She happened to be at sea in the Gulf of Mexico when Japan's surrender was announced on 15 August 1945, and returned to Plymouth the following month, work for both British and American fleets that never generated headlines but that the whole carrier war effort in the Pacific and Indian Oceans remarkably depended upon.

Back to America, and a Long Merchant Afterlife

With the war won, Atheling was one of six escort carriers, alongside Fencer, Patroller, Queen, Rajah and Ranee, converted for trooping duty, her hangar deck turned into accommodation for around 60 officers and 1,000 ratings at a cost of just over £17,000.

She made three trooping voyages between November 1945 and October 1946 carrying Commonwealth personnel home to Australia and New Zealand; one of them, in the spring of 1946, brought Fijian and Tongan contingents to Britain in time for the Victory Parade in London.

That parade was on 8 June 1946, and the men she landed at Portsmouth were part of something worth pausing over. The London Victory Celebrations put contingents from the whole Commonwealth and Empire down the Mall in front of enormous crowds, and the Fijians marched in their army tunics worn over the sulu, the wrapped skirt, which is exactly how they had fought through the Solomons, where the Fiji Infantry Regiment built a formidable reputation as jungle troops and produced a Victoria Cross. There is a photograph in the Imperial War Museum of their farewell party in Kensington Gardens afterwards.

It makes an odd sort of sense as a last job for her. A merchant hull laid down in Tacoma, finished as an American escort carrier, handed to Britain, rebuilt in Canada, worked by the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean, lent back to the Americans in the Pacific and then converted into a troopship spent the summer of 1946 carrying Pacific islanders across the world to be thanked in London. Nobody designed her for any of that, and she did all of it.

She was returned to the United States and struck from the Naval Register on 7 February 1947.

Sold to National Bulk Carriers and converted into the merchant ship Roma, she made her maiden voyage on the Italy to Australia emigrant route in August 1951, a long civilian career before finally being scrapped at Savona in November 1967, over two decades after her wartime service had quietly, effectively, kept Britain's carrier squadrons supplied with exactly what they needed, exactly where they needed it.

Her civilian afterlife deserves a proper look as well, because Roma was not a tramp steamer. The Italy to Australia run in the 1950s carried emigrants, tens of thousands of them, leaving a country wrecked by the war for a continent that wanted people, and a converted escort carrier with a very large open hangar deck was well suited to carrying families in numbers. So a hull built in Tacoma to hunt submarines, lent to Britain, lent on to America, and used to move squadrons and then soldiers, spent the last stretch of her life carrying Italian families to new lives in Australia. Very few warships get a second act that useful.