HMS Attacker (D02): First of the Class, and the Last to the Scrapyard
The Ship the Class Was Named After
HMS Attacker matters out of proportion to what she did, because she was first. Her keel went down at the Western Pipe and Steel Corporation in San Francisco in April 1941, and on 27 September that year she was launched as the merchant freighter Steel Artisan, which is exactly the sort of name a cargo ship gets and no sort of name for a warship at all.
The United States Navy requisitioned her on 26 December 1941, nineteen days after Pearl Harbor, for conversion into an auxiliary aircraft carrier to be called USS Barnes. She never sailed under that name either.
On 30 September 1942 she was commissioned as USS Barnes and handed to the Royal Navy the same day, and she commissioned as HMS Attacker at San Francisco the following week under Captain W W P Shirley-Rollison.
After them came the second batch, the Rulers, which included HMS Emperor (D98) and HMS Khedive (D62) and were built as carriers from the keel up rather than converted from a hull already on the stocks.
Being first mattered more than it sounds. Britain in 1942 had a shortage of flight decks that no shipyard at home could fix inside two years, and the Bogue conversions were the answer: take a hull already building as a freighter, put a wooden flight deck on top of it, and accept every compromise that follows.
Attacker was the first of those bargains Britain actually took delivery of, and the terms were plainly written on her. She displaced 14,170 tons, ran to 486 feet, carried about twenty aircraft on a flight deck 442 feet long and 80 wide, and had a ship’s company of 646.
She could make eighteen knots downhill with a following wind, which turned out to matter a great deal more than anybody had allowed for.
Everything the Royal Navy learned about operating these ships, it learned starting with this one. The photograph at the top of this article shows her at anchor in San Francisco Bay on 13 November 1942, a Swordfish parked forward of her island, one day into the flying trials that began the whole business.
Learning the Job, Expensively
Those trials cost a man almost immediately. On 1 February 1943, during deck landing practice, a Martlet of 898 Squadron went in and its pilot, Sub-Lieutenant R U Davis of the New Zealand reserve, was killed.
It is the first entry in a long list, and it is worth registering that the list starts before she had been anywhere near an enemy.
She spent the early part of 1943 doing what almost every escort carrier did first, which was carrying other people's aeroplanes about.
It is worth saying what that involved, because it vanishes from most accounts in half a sentence: an aircraft carrier crossing the Atlantic with her hangar and her flight deck packed solid with somebody else's fighters, unable to fly a single one of them because there is nowhere left to land, escorted like a merchant ship and moving about as fast as one.
She took Swordfish of 838 and later 840 Squadron aboard, ran convoy air cover out of the Caribbean, and reached the Clyde in the spring, going into Liverpool on 10 April to be made acceptable to the Royal Navy. On 15 June she embarked the Seafires of 886 and 879 Squadrons, and on 3 August she sailed for the Mediterranean in company with HMS Stalker (D91), who would be beside her for most of what followed.
Salerno
She reached Malta on 7 September 1943 and two days later was off the Italian coast as part of Force V, the escort carrier group holding air cover over the Salerno beachhead until the airfields ashore could be taken. The other ships were HMS Unicorn (I72), Battler, Hunter and Stalker, with HMS Illustrious (87) and HMS Formidable (67) in Force H behind them, and the cruiser HMS Charybdis (88) bringing Eisenhower towards the landings.
It was at Salerno that the Germans first used radio-controlled bombs in the Mediterranean, which is covered in the articles on HMS Warspite (03) and HMS Uganda (66).
What the flat calm in the bay did to the Seafire force is told properly in Unicorn's article, and Hunter's explains why one ship came through it nearly unscathed. Attacker's own contribution over the four days was 132 sorties, 75 of them patrols flown by 879 Squadron and 57 by 886.
Across the whole force, 713 sorties were flown and not one aircraft was lost to the enemy.
Her losses came from the deck and from the ordinary carelessness that a crowded flight deck punishes without mercy. On the first day Sub-Lieutenant G Calder floated over the arrester gear and went through the barriers.
On the 11th Sub-Lieutenant Sturges could not get his undercarriage down and was sent to put his Seafire on the beach at Salerno instead, which he did, abandoning the aircraft there. Lieutenant Morrison landed ashore the same day with hook trouble.
And on 10 September, Ordnance Seaman Edwin Kershaw ran into a turning propeller and was killed instantly. He was buried at sea at eleven o'clock that morning.
He is the only member of her ship's company named in her record as killed, he was not aircrew, and he died on a working deck a few feet from where he was supposed to be standing. Anybody who has served on a flight deck will recognise exactly how that happens and how quickly.
Two Sisters in Three Days
She went back to Rosyth in October 1943 to be rebuilt as an assault carrier, which meant new radar, a great deal more radio, and fourteen powered twin mountings in place of her hand-worked close-range guns. The point of the conversion, as with Hunter, was to turn a convoy escort into a floating airfield that could talk to an army.
The work-up that followed was not her finest hour. On 22 January 1944 she was in collision with HMS Chaser. On the 24th, two days later, she was in collision with HMS Fencer. Both were her own sisters, both incidents caused minor damage, and she spent February in a Liverpool dock having the results put right.
Escort carriers were slow, high-sided and awkward, and they operated in company at night with their lights out, but hitting two of your own class inside seventy-two hours takes a certain commitment.
The flying accidents kept pace. Between January and March her pilots put Seafires into the barrier, over the port side, over the starboard bow and upside down on the deck. Sub-Lieutenant C M Carter struck the rounddown, caught a wire, and went over the side anyway; he was pulled out of the water.
Sub-Lieutenant J W Leake missed every wire, bounced the barrier and dived over the bow into the sea. Sub-Lieutenant R G Hallas went over all the wires, hit the barrier and turned his aircraft over, and walked away from it.
At the end of April she was sent north to Scapa Flow to join the Home Fleet for a strike on the Norwegian coast, and the operation was cancelled. Stalker was sent for the same job at the same time and it was cancelled on her too, so both ships spent a fortnight in Orkney achieving nothing and were then sent to the Mediterranean, which is where the rest of their war happened. Attacker never did fly an operation in northern waters.
One Squadron, Two and a Half Years
Squadrons came and went from these ships constantly, which makes one entry in Attacker’s record stand out. 879 Naval Air Squadron embarked in July 1943 and was still aboard in November 1945.
That is very nearly her entire operational life, and it is unusual. 879 flew her patrols over Salerno, her bombing and spotting sorties over southern France, her four hundred sorties in a week in the Aegean, and her last flying in the Indian Ocean, and it went ashore for the final time only after the Japanese surrender. Ships in this war were frequently a set of aircraft that happened to be borrowing a deck.
Attacker and 879 were something closer to a marriage, and the casualties in the paragraphs that follow are almost all theirs.
An Australian Takes Command
On 12 May 1944 Captain H B Farncomb of the Royal Australian Navy came aboard as her commanding officer, and Attacker became something slightly unusual: a Royal Navy carrier under an Australian captain.
Farncomb was not a passenger. He was the first graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College to reach flag rank, he had commanded the cruiser Australia, and he held the Distinguished Service Order and the American Navy Cross.
Attacker was his first aircraft carrier, and within three months of taking her over he was senior officer of the five escort carrier captains in Task Force 88 for the invasion of southern France. In December, having finished with Attacker, he flew to Manus and took command of the Australian Squadron.
It hit the mole instead and detonated there, and no serious damage was done. Two days later the Normandy landings began and nobody thought about it again.
More to Explore
Dragoon: 226 Sorties, 120 of Them With Bombs
She reached the assault area off southern France on 15 August 1944 and began flying the next morning. Her work was ground attack, armed reconnaissance and gunfire spotting, including reporting the fall of shot for the cruiser Aurora, and by the end of the operation 879 Squadron had flown 226 sorties, of which 120 were bombing missions.
Task Force 88's flagship was the cruiser HMS Royalist (C89); Emperor and Khedive were in the other British group and Hunter and Stalker alongside her in 88.2. The wider invasion sequence is followed in the article on HMS Troubridge (R00).
It was a punishing fortnight for her aircraft. Sub-Lieutenant W A Clarke appears three times in her record inside a week: on the 19th he dive-bombed suspected tanks through heavy anti-aircraft fire and then flew into the barrier on his return; on the 21st he flew a camera sortie and, coming back, caught his hook on a plate on the after lift and went into the deck park forward.
In that crash Sub-Lieutenant A A Gowan of the New Zealand reserve, still sitting in the cockpit of his own parked aircraft, had his thigh broken by the propeller of Clarke's Seafire as it came through the cockpit door. There is no more precise illustration of what a wrecked aircraft does to the people standing around it.
Sub-Lieutenant A I R Shaw was hit by anti-aircraft fire after attacking German mobile artillery and had to bale out over enemy ground. He was captured, and he escaped. Stalker had two pilots do much the same thing that August, and her article tells those stories at length.
Four Hundred Sorties in a Week
Released from Dragoon on 28 August, she was at Alexandria by 2 September and joined the British Aegean Force. What followed is the busiest flying of her whole war and the least known.
She relieved Hunter on 15 September for Operation Outing, and between the 14th and the 20th her aircraft flew 400 sorties against shipping and shore targets around Crete and Rhodes. Four hundred sorties in a week, from a converted freighter carrying twenty aircraft, is a rate that would embarrass a good many larger ships.
A second phase at the end of the month added 102 more, including spotting for shore bombardment.
In October she sailed with Stalker, Emperor and Royalist for the Greek landings, strafed the wireless station on Levitha on the 3rd, and supported the landings at Mitylene and Piskopi towards the end of the month. The destroyers' side of that campaign is in the articles on HMS Termagant (R89) and HMS Teazer (F23).
She sailed for home on 31 October with Hunter and Stalker and reached Plymouth on 9 November. Captain Farncomb had gone by then, and Captain G F Renwick took her through the last year of the war and the first weeks of the peace.
The East Indies, and a Bad Fortnight in July
She refitted at Taranto over the winter and joined the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron in Ceylon in the spring of 1945, arriving too late to take part in the Rangoon landings. Much of her last year was aircraft transport, shuttling machines between Indian, South African and Ceylonese ports, which is unglamorous and was exactly what the fleet needed.
A ten-day flying period in July went badly. On the 11th one pilot put his Seafire into the barrier and two more struck the deck on landing, and Sub-Lieutenant A W K Foxon was killed when his aircraft went through the barrier, damaged the parked aircraft beyond it and dived over the starboard side into the sea.
The following day brought more barrier crashes, and Sub-Lieutenant H C Vane hit the edge of the flight deck and went into the water, from which he was recovered safely.
In August she sailed to support an attack on Penang that was cancelled when Japan agreed to surrender, and then went to Penang anyway, arriving off George Town on 28 August for the negotiations that ended with the formal surrender of Japanese forces in Malaya aboard HMS Nelson (28).
She landed Royal Marines at Singapore in early September and was among the ninety-odd ships in Singapore Roads for the surrender ceremony on 12 September.
Her battle honours read Salerno 1943, Atlantic 1943 to 1944, South France 1944 and Aegean 1944. Four, all of them European, for the first of the eleven.
Fairsky
She came home by way of Bombay and Malta, collected American troops at Southampton in December 1945, and was handed back to the United States Navy at Norfolk on Christmas Eve. She was struck from the American list in February 1946 and put up for disposal, and there she sat.
What happened next took twelve years and produced the most remarkable second life of any ship in this class. She was sold in September 1946 for conversion into a merchant vessel, changed hands again in 1950 and was renamed Castel Forte, and lay unfinished while various owners ran out of money or interest.
The Vlasov group, who ran the Sitmar Line, eventually got hold of her, and in 1957 the work restarted in earnest. Her hull was given a new raked bow. In May 1958 the name Castel Forte came off her and a new one went on.
On the afternoon of 26 June 1958 the SS Fairsky sailed from Southampton with 1,430 passengers aboard, bound for Australia. She spent the next twelve years on the assisted migration run, carrying British families out to a new country in their thousands, and became a familiar sight in Australian and New Zealand ports.
A very large number of Australians can trace their arrival to a ship that had once flown Seafires over Salerno, and most of them will never have known it.
Her end was slow and undignified. On 23 June 1977 she struck a submerged wreck near Jakarta and had to be beached to stop her sinking.
She was judged beyond economical repair, sat about as a moored casino and tourist ship, was destroyed by fire on 3 November 1979 and was finally broken up at Hong Kong from 24 May 1980.
Last of the Eleven
That date is the point of this article. Hunter was cut up at Valencia in 1965, Stalker at Gandia from September 1975, Khedive at the same Spanish yard in 1976.
Attacker, the first of them into British service, was still afloat and still earning money in 1979, and was not finally taken apart until the summer of 1980, thirty-five years after the war and thirty-nine after she was launched as a freighter with a name like a piece of industrial equipment.
There is a neatness to that which is worth sitting with. These were emergency ships, thrown together out of merchant hulls because Britain needed flight decks faster than Britain could build them, and nobody expected any of them to last.
The name ship of the class spent three years as a warship and twenty-two as a liner, and the thing she is most likely to be remembered for is not Salerno or the Aegean at all. It is the families she put ashore at Fremantle and Melbourne and Sydney, who had no idea they were sailing to Australia on the first escort carrier Britain was ever lent.
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