HMS Avenger (D14): Twelve Survivors From a Crew of 555

From Merchant Hull to Escort Carrier

HMS Avenger began life as the merchant vessel Rio Hudson, laid down on 28 November 1939 at the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania, and launched on 27 November 1940 for the Moore-McCormack shipping line.

Before she could enter merchant service, the US Navy purchased her and converted her into an escort carrier at Bethlehem Steel's yard on Staten Island, and she was transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease on 31 July 1941.

She was commissioned on 2 March 1942, displacing 8,200 tons and capable of 16.5 knots, carrying up to 15 aircraft, typically a mixture of Sea Hurricane fighters and Fairey Swordfish, alongside a crew of 555 including aircrew.

Into the Arctic With PQ 18

After flight deck training with 816 Naval Air Squadron's Swordfish beginning in April 1942 and early convoy escort work across the Atlantic, Avenger departed Britain on 3 September 1942 for Arctic convoy PQ 18, widely regarded as the largest and most successful Russian convoy of the war to that point.

PQ 18 only makes sense set against what had happened to the convoy before it. In July 1942 PQ 17 had been ordered to scatter on a mistaken report that the German battleship Tirpitz was at sea, and twenty-four of its thirty-five merchant ships were picked off one by one over the following days. It was the worst convoy disaster of the war and it very nearly ended the Arctic route altogether. PQ 18 was the answer: a far larger escort, a dedicated close support force, and, for the first time, a carrier sailing with the convoy itself so that fighters were overhead rather than hundreds of miles away.

The way Avenger was handled was new as well. Rather than steaming outside the convoy where she could work her aircraft freely, she operated inside the columns of merchant ships, using them as cover and coming out into open water only to fly on and off. It gave her the convoy's combined anti-aircraft fire for protection and it made the German bomber crews' problem considerably harder. Losing ten merchant ships out of forty-one against the weight of attack PQ 18 faced, and no escorts at all, was regarded at the time as a very good result, and it was the carrier that made the difference.

Under Rear-Admiral Robert Burnett, she provided crucial fighter protection against sustained Luftwaffe air attacks between 13 and 15 September, her Sea Hurricanes engaging German bombers and reconnaissance aircraft while her Swordfish flew anti-submarine patrols.

One of those Swordfish found the German submarine U-589 on the surface on 14 September and, though chased off by a Luftwaffe flying boat before it could attack, its sighting report brought the destroyer HMS Onslow racing in; Onslow's depth charges accounted for U-589 and all 44 men aboard her.

The convoy reached Archangel having lost only ten of its 41 merchant ships and none of its escorts, a notably strong result for the period, though Avenger's own captain, Commander Anthony Colthurst, submitted a critical assessment afterward highlighting just how inadequate escort carrier aircraft still were for the intensity of combat they were being asked to handle.

Colthurst's report deserves respect rather than a passing mention. He had just brought a convoy through and been praised for it, and what he wrote afterwards said that the aircraft he had been given were not good enough for the job: Sea Hurricanes were second-hand, worn, outclassed by what the Luftwaffe was flying, and there were nowhere near enough of them. He went further and set down recommendations for how escort carriers ought to be designed in future, based on the faults he had found in his own ship. Six weeks later he was dead in one of them, and the specific fault that killed him was among the things he had identified.

Supporting the Torch Landings

Avenger departed Scapa Flow again on 16 October 1942, this time bound for North Africa with a reinforced squadron of 20mm-armed Sea Hurricanes, arriving off the coast on 8 November to support Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa.

Between 8 and 10 November she flew 60 fighter missions supporting the landings, survived a near-miss torpedo attack on 9 November, and had to put in for engine repairs before continuing on to Gibraltar.

Sunk in Nine Hours

Avenger's war ended catastrophically in the early hours of 15 November 1942. Just nine hours after departing Gibraltar on her way back to Britain, she was struck by a single torpedo fired by the German submarine U-155, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Adolf Piening, at 3:20am.

What made the loss so total is worth explaining plainly. The torpedo went in amidships on the port side and penetrated to the part of the ship where the bombs and the aviation petrol were stowed. Escort carriers of this type were converted merchant hulls, and the magazine amidships had no meaningful protection around it, so a single hit reached the one place aboard where a hit could not be survived. The explosion tore the centre out of her. She went down stern first inside about two minutes, which is not enough time to launch a boat, order an abandonment or in most cases get up a ladder. Twelve men out of five hundred and fifty-five is what two minutes buys.

The ship sank with devastating speed, and the loss of life was correspondingly severe: 516 of her crew perished, with only twelve men rescued, a survival rate of barely two percent from a crew of 555. Commander Anthony Colthurst, the captain who had argued so pointedly after PQ 18 that escort carriers needed better aircraft, was among those lost, going down with his ship west of Gibraltar.

It stands as one of the very worst losses suffered by any British aircraft carrier during the entire war, a brutal end for a ship that had, just weeks earlier, been flying air cover over one of the most successful Arctic convoys ever run.

And she was not the last. On 27 March 1943 the escort carrier HMS Dasher blew up in the Firth of Clyde with no enemy anywhere near her, killing 379 of the 528 men aboard. The inquiry never fixed on a single cause but returned repeatedly to the same subject: the storage and handling of aviation petrol in ships that had been built to merchant standards and then filled with the most dangerous liquid in the fleet. The Royal Navy's response was to cut the amount of avgas carried in escort carriers by more than half, and to rework the systems that moved it about. Two ships and nearly nine hundred men bought that change.

The man who fired that torpedo is worth knowing about, and not only because of what he did that morning. Adolf Piening made nine war patrols in U-155 and sank twenty-five merchant ships of something like a hundred and twenty-six thousand tons, plus Avenger; the total puts him nineteenth on the list of U-boat commanders by tonnage, and he was given the Knight's Cross for it. The thing he is actually remembered for in the German submarine service, though, is a piece of navigation. By 1943 the Bay of Biscay had become the most dangerous stretch of water in the world for a U-boat, because Coastal Command was flying over it constantly with radar and depth charges and boats were being caught on the surface going in and out of the French bases. Piening worked out that a boat could hug the coast of France and northern Spain in shallow water, inside the aircraft patrol lines, and get through. It was adopted across the flotillas and it is still called the Piening route.

And then the war ended and he did something almost nobody in this series does. Piening survived, spent more than two years as a prisoner of war, and went home to a country with no navy at all. When West Germany was allowed to rebuild one in 1956 he joined it, and in 1959, seventeen years after sinking a British aircraft carrier and five hundred and sixteen of her people, he was appointed to command the 1st Escort Squadron of the Bundesmarine, which is to say a NATO escort force operating alongside the Royal Navy in the North Sea and the Atlantic. He died at Kiel in May 1984. There is no neat way to hold those two facts together and there is no point pretending otherwise. Both of them are true, and the second one is a fair description of what the second half of the twentieth century actually consisted of.