HMS Campania (D48): Arctic Convoys, the Festival of Britain and the First British Atomic Bomb

Begun as a Cargo Ship

HMS Campania was laid down by Harland and Wolff at Belfast on 5 August 1941 as a refrigerated cargo ship, meant for the meat trade from New Zealand. On 29 July 1942 the Admiralty requisitioned her for completion as an escort carrier, one of only a handful built in British yards, and she was launched on 17 June 1943.

She was the second major ship of the Navy to carry the name. The first, a Cunard liner converted into a seaplane carrier in the First World War, sank after a collision in the Firth of Forth on 5 November 1918, six days before the Armistice, and the new ship's badge, a winged golden lion, was taken from the Cunard company's own.

She is usually counted with Nairana and Vindex as one of the Nairana Class, though she was built to a separate design of her own. Like them she had her hangar and flight deck built in as part of the hull rather than added on top, and her shipyard work included watertight decks and extra bulkheads to make her stronger.

She had only one lift, and the lack of parking space forward meant she could only work about twenty aircraft, but she was given a fighter direction room for controlling her fighters by radar, and floodlighting so that aircraft could be handled on deck at night.

A New Kind of Carrier

She was completed on 7 March 1944 under Acting Captain Kenneth Short, who had been appointed to her the previous November and was to command her for a year. She carried an unusually complete set of radar for so small a ship: Type 281B for warning of aircraft, Type 276 for surface contacts, and the new Type 277, which could find the height of aircraft as well as their range.

The methods worked out on board her for collecting and displaying all this radar information became standard in the major warships of the fleet. The second photograph on this page shows her at anchor on 27 March 1944, three weeks after her completion.

In April she embarked 813 Naval Air Squadron, with twelve Swordfish, four Wildcat fighters and four Fulmars, the old two-seat fighters now flown as night fighters, and after a return to her builders for defects she began operations on 23 May. Her first work was with the convoys between the Clyde, Gibraltar and Freetown.

Through June, July and August she sailed with the outward OS and KMS convoys and came home with the SL and MKS convoys, without loss. Flying from her deck in the Atlantic swell had its mishaps: on 8 June a Swordfish ditched and its crew were picked up by the merchant ship Accrington, and on 19 June another came down off Achill Head in County Mayo, where all three men were rescued by an Irish trawler.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 22 June 1944, just after she had brought in the homeward convoy SL 160, with her Swordfish and Wildcats ranged on deck.

The Admiral's Flagship

In September 1944 she joined the Home Fleet for the Arctic. On 16 September Rear Admiral Roderick McGrigor hoisted his flag in her, and next day she sailed with Striker, the battleship Rodney and the cruiser Diadem to cover JW 60 to the Kola Inlet.

On the way home with RA 60, after U-310 had sunk two merchant ships, a Swordfish flown by Sub Lieutenant Mitchell and Lieutenant Bentley attacked a U-boat west of Bear Island on 30 September, and both men were mentioned in despatches.

At the time, and in Mason's record, the attack was credited with sinking U-921; the post-war analysts no longer accept it, and U-921 is now listed as missing, cause unknown, after 24 September. The same day another Swordfish failed to return, and Lieutenant Commander Allen and Lieutenant Tilley were lost.

In October she joined the cruiser Devonshire and the escort carrier Trumpeter in Operation Hardy, in which Avengers laid mines in the Norwegian leads off Molde while her Wildcats attacked positions ashore; the strike on shipping that was to follow was called off because of the weather. In November came a voyage of a different kind.

With the cruiser Berwick and destroyers including Saumarez and Cassandra, she escorted the liners Empress of Australia and Scythia to Murmansk with some 11,000 Soviet citizens on board who had been captured in Normandy while serving in the German army. The British escort and the naval liaison staff were not allowed ashore to watch them landed.

On 3 November Lieutenant Leamon and Sub Lieutenant Buxton shot down a shadowing Blohm and Voss flying boat, and on 13 November, on the way home with RA 61A, Sub Lieutenants Davies and Machin shot down another.

At the end of November McGrigor's flag came back to her for JW 62, with Nairana and the cruiser Bellona, and Davies and Machin got a third flying boat on the way out. On 11 December, as the return convoy RA 62 left, Cassandra had her bow blown off by U-365.

On the night of 13 December two of Campania's Swordfish, L and Q of 813 Squadron, found U-365 east of Jan Mayen and sank her with depth charges. All 50 of her crew were lost, and the four airmen, Sub Lieutenants Hutchison, Famingham and Henley and Lieutenant Chapman, were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

In that operation the carrier flew 180 hours, seventy of them at night. A few days after Christmas, searching for German coastal convoys, her aircraft sank three Norwegian fishing boats by mistake, an error that caused bitter feeling on the Norwegian coast.

A sortie at the end of January, Operation Charlton, was beaten back by the weather, but a few days later, in Operation Winded, her Swordfish launched at eight in the evening and, with Nairana's, hit four German merchant ships off Vaagso.

In February 1945, again as McGrigor's flagship and again with Nairana, she covered JW 64 and RA 64. On 6 February Sub Lieutenant Fleischmann-Allen shot down a shadowing Ju 88, but his companion, Sub Lieutenant Smyth, was lost.

The next day 48 Ju 88s were detected coming in, and six were shot down by the two carriers' fighters and a seventh by the corvette Denbigh Castle. On 10 February one of her pilots, Lieutenant Quigg, ditched near Nairana and was picked up by the destroyer Opportune, and another landed in the barrier after being fired on by mistake from the cruiser Bellona.

On the way home the convoy met gales of Force 11 and was eventually scattered, but the carriers kept flying off fighters whenever the bombers came.

In March, now with 825 Squadron, she sailed with JW 65 and RA 65 flying the flag of Vice Admiral Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton, under her new captain, Conrad Alers-Hankey.

On 20 March a snowstorm stopped all flying, and U-boats waiting off Kola sank the sloop Lapwing and the American merchant ship Thomas Donaldson and damaged another merchant ship, but the rest of the convoy got through, and RA 65 reached home on 31 March without loss. The destroyer Zambesi was among her screen.

It was her last Russian convoy; 825 Squadron had flown 87 hours, nineteen of them at night.

Trooping and Reserve

In April she gave deck landing training to the Barracudas of 815 Squadron in the Clyde, losing one over the side and another, with its pilot, near Millport. She was seriously damaged when she was undocked on 5 June 1945, and after repairs in London she was used as a troopship by the Nore Command, sailing in September for Trinidad to bring home men and stores of the naval air station at Piarco.

She was laid up in reserve at the end of 1945. In 1947 she was considered for conversion into a transport manned by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, but nothing came of it.

The Festival Ship

In May 1950 work began at Cammell Laird at Birkenhead to turn her into the Festival of Britain's Sea Travelling Exhibition, carrying the story told on the South Bank in London around the coast. Painted white and decorated with bunting, she carried three exhibitions, called the Land of Britain, Discovery, and People at Home.

Between 4 May and 6 October 1951 she spent ten days or a fortnight at each of Southampton, Dundee, Newcastle, Hull, Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Belfast, Birkenhead and Glasgow. At Hull alone 87,814 people went aboard in ten days. A photograph in the South Tyneside archive shows her leaving the Tyne that summer.

Operation Hurricane

In 1952 she was recommissioned for the most secret work of her life. Britain was to test its first atomic bomb in the Monte Bello Islands, off the north-west coast of Australia, and Campania was refitted as the headquarters ship of Rear Admiral Arthur Torlesse, who commanded the naval force, with Captain A. B.

Cole in command of the ship. The exhibition gave way to laboratories, workshops and offices for the scientists, with a plant to make fresh water, since the islands had none, and she carried two Sea Otter amphibians and three Dragonfly helicopters.

She sailed from Portsmouth on 11 June 1952 with the frigate Plym, which carried the bomb itself, and went round the Cape of Good Hope rather than through Suez, reaching Fremantle on 31 July. The tank landing ships Narvik, Zeebrugge and Tracker completed the little fleet.

On 3 October 1952 the bomb was exploded inside Plym, anchored off Trimouille Island, and the frigate vanished. Campania watched from fifteen miles away.

She was hot and crowded in the tropics and was not thought well suited to the job of a headquarters ship, but she brought the force home, sailing from Fremantle on 9 November and arriving at Portsmouth on 16 December 1952.

She was laid up at Chatham, placed on the disposal list in 1954, and sold to Hughes Bolckow. She arrived at Blyth under tow on 11 November 1955 to be broken up.

Campania earned the battle honours Atlantic 1944, Norway 1944 to 1945 and Arctic 1944 to 1945. The other ships of her class are in the Nairana Class escort carriers collection.