HMS Emperor (D98): The Longest Attacking Flight the Fleet Air Arm Ever Made

Named After a Bay in Alaska

HMS Emperor began as a set of American drawings for a cargo ship. She was laid down at the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation on 23 June 1942 as USS Pybus, one of the enormous run of escort carriers built on the United States Maritime Commission's Type C3 merchant hull, and she was launched on 7 October the same year, three and a half months after the keel went down.

That is not a misprint. Escort carriers were built at a rate that would have seemed like witchcraft to any pre-war naval architect, because the whole point of them was that they could be.

Pybus took her name from a bay on the Alaskan coast, the American practice being to name escort carriers after bays and sounds.

She commissioned into the United States Navy on 31 May 1943, went out to the Pacific for a short spell with the Pacific Fleet, and then came back through the Panama Canal to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where on 6 August 1943 she was decommissioned from one navy and commissioned into another on the same day.

Her first British commanding officer was Captain Thomas John Norman Hilken, and her new name was Emperor, which is a considerable promotion for a bay.

She was one of twenty-three ships the Royal Navy called the Ruler class, all of them Seattle-Tacoma hulls, and collectively the most numerous class of aircraft carrier the Royal Navy has ever operated. Her sisters turn up throughout these pages: HMS Ruler (D72) gave the class its British name, HMS Atheling (D51) spent her war ferrying other people's aircraft, and HMS Empress (D42) would end up alongside Emperor in the Bay of Bengal.

She sailed from New York on 20 August 1943 with convoy HX 253, reached the Clyde on 3 September, and went into Belfast four days later for three months of alterations.

The most important of these was to her aviation petrol system, which the Royal Navy rebuilt in every American-built carrier it was given after the losses of HMS Avenger (D14) and HMS Dasher had shown what a badly arranged petrol installation could do to a ship of this size. That work is described in more detail in the article on HMS Pursuer, who had it done at the same time.

Emperor came out of Belfast in early December ready to receive aircraft.

Twenty Hellcats and Somewhere to Put Them

The aircraft she received matter, because Emperor is the ship in which the Fleet Air Arm's Grumman Hellcat force went to war in European waters. On 30 October 1943 the 7th Naval Fighter Wing was formed with six squadrons, two allocated to each of three escort carriers: Emperor, Pursuer and HMS Searcher.

Emperor's pair were 800 and 804 Naval Air Squadrons, and they embarked on 5 December 1943 for a week of flying training in the Irish Sea before going back ashore to Eglinton in Northern Ireland.

The aeroplane itself had arrived under a different name. The Admiralty initially called the F6F the Gannet, on the sensible British principle that a naval aircraft should be named after a seabird, and then gave up and reverted to Hellcat along with the rest of the Lend-Lease fighter names.

Whatever it was called, it was a serious machine: fast, immensely strong, and able to out-turn anything the Luftwaffe kept in Norway.

Her first two months of 1944 were spent doing something considerably less glamorous. On 11 January both squadrons re-embarked and she sailed for Norfolk, Virginia, arriving on the 25th, then joined convoy HX 278 out of New York and Halifax and was back on the Clyde on 18 February.

On 6 March the squadrons rejoined for the passage north, and on 18 March she was allocated to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow. She had been in commission for seven months and had not yet flown an angry aeroplane.

Kaafjord, 3 April 1944

Sixteen days later she was part of one of the most successful carrier strikes of the war. Operation Tungsten sent the fleet carriers HMS Furious (47) and HMS Victorious (R38) against the German battleship Tirpitz in Kaafjord, with four escort carriers providing the fighters and the cruiser HMS Royalist (C89) leading them out.

The mechanics of the attack, the two waves, the fourteen bombs in about a minute and the German casualty list, are told in Royalist's article and in Pursuer's, and there is no sense in telling them a third time.

What belongs to Emperor is narrower. She flew the Hellcats of 800 and 804 Squadrons, the fighters went in ahead of the bombers to strafe the flak positions, and the reason the whole operation cost only four aircraft is that they did it well.

Emperor lost one machine, and lost it in the least dramatic way available: Sub-Lieutenant Hoare of the New Zealand reserve ditched near the ship and was picked up. The supply ship CA Larsen, moored nearby, was badly knocked about in the process. It was a good first day at the office.

The Norwegian Spring

What followed was six weeks of the sort of fighting that gets a line in a service record and no lines at all anywhere else. A repeat of Tungsten, Operation Planet, was set for 24 April and cancelled by the weather.

On 26 April, Operation Ridge Able put Emperor's fighters over a German convoy off Bodo alongside Furious, Victorious, Pursuer, Searcher and HMS Striker (D12). Three ships were sunk and a fourth damaged, an account of which is in Pursuer's article.

Emperor's share of the bill was two young men: Sub-Lieutenant Brine of 804 Squadron, who died of his injuries after his aircraft hit the roundown coming aboard, and Sub-Lieutenant Roncoroni of 800, who was hit by flak, ditched south of Bodo and spent the rest of the war a prisoner.

On 8 May came Operation Hoops, a shipping strike between Gossen and Kristiansund with Searcher and Striker in company, and this time the Luftwaffe came up. Fighters of Jagdgeschwader 5, a mixture of Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, hit the Hellcats on the first pass and shot one down; Sub-Lieutenant R L Thompson went into the sea off the Norwegian coast and drowned.

The Hellcats then turned inside them, which is the one thing a 109 pilot really did not want a Grumman to do, and claimed two 109s and a 190. Sub-Lieutenant J G Devitt took one Messerschmitt, Hoare shared another, and Lieutenant Blyth Ritchie of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve took the Focke-Wulf.

Five enemy aircraft were destroyed by the escort fighters across the day.

Six days later, on 14 May, Operation Potluck A took her and Striker to the shipping at Rorvik, north of Trondheim, where three merchant ships were hit and a formation of Heinkel 115 floatplanes was caught in the air. Ritchie shot one down and shared another with Lieutenant Commander Stanley Orr, and a further pair of kills was divided between Orr, Hoare and other pilots of the wing.

The day cost Emperor another pilot, Sub-Lieutenant R S Hollway, whose undercarriage jammed half down on his return; he baled out over the sea off Vikna and was drowned. The following morning Potluck B sent the Hellcats against a fish oil factory at Fossevaag and two armed trawlers, all of which were duly dealt with.

A good deal of the Second World War looked less like a fleet action and more like this: two squadrons of first-rate fighters sent a long way north to burn down a fish oil factory, because the fish oil was going to Germany.

Ritchie

Blyth Ritchie is worth stopping on, because he is the reason Emperor has a small permanent place in Fleet Air Arm history. He was a Scot from Uddingston in Lanarkshire, and he had already scored three and a half victories flying Sea Hurricanes in the Mediterranean in 1942.

The Focke-Wulf he shot down on 8 May 1944, flying Hellcat JV132 off Emperor's deck, took him to five, which made him the first Fleet Air Arm pilot to become an ace on the type. Six days later he added the Heinkel and a share of a second. He held the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar, and he was twenty-two.

A number of accounts have him killed in an operational accident within days of that. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission record is clearer and less tidy: Lieutenant (A) Blyth Ritchie DSC and Bar, RNVR, son of James and Elizabeth Blyth Ritchie, died on 12 July 1944, and his ship at the time was HMS Heron, the naval air station at Yeovilton.

Emperor's squadrons had come ashore to Ayr on 19 June, and Emperor herself sailed for the Mediterranean on 15 July. He missed the rest of her war by three days. He is commemorated at Glasgow Crematorium.

A Month in the Western Approaches

Between Norway and the Mediterranean there is a month that earned her a battle honour and almost no attention. On 5 June 1944 Emperor took station well out in the western approaches with Pursuer and HMS Tracker (D24), hunting the U-boats coming out of the French Atlantic ports towards the invasion beaches.

Nothing much happened to Emperor, which was the entire object of the exercise. Pursuer's article carries the detail of those days, including the invasion stripes being painted on the aircraft by anybody who could hold a brush.

On 18 June, 804 Squadron was disbanded into 800, its aircrew and aircraft absorbed to give Emperor a single twenty-aircraft squadron instead of two small ones. It was a common enough reorganisation in 1944, and it is worth noting only because it means that from this point forward the story of 800 Squadron and the story of HMS Emperor are effectively the same story.

Dragoon: 252 Sorties, Eleven Aircraft

She sailed on 15 July for the Mediterranean, joining a seven-carrier group for Operation Dragoon, the landings on the Riviera coast of southern France. Her particular company was Task Force 88.1, alongside HMS Attacker, HMS Khedive, Pursuer and Searcher, with Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge flying his flag in Royalist.

The landings went in on 15 August, and the carriers worked the coast until the 19th before withdrawing to Maddalena in Sardinia, sailing again on the 21st and finishing at Alexandria on 2 September.

Emperor's own figures for the operation are 252 operational sorties for the loss of eleven aircraft. Royalist's article covers what Task Force 88 achieved as a whole, and Pursuer's has the fighter numbers across the British contingent.

For Emperor it was the busiest fortnight she had yet had, and it was about to be beaten.

The Aegean, Where a Carrier Ran a Prison

One of her eight battle honours is Aegean 1944, and it covers the strangest part of her war. The Germans were trying to get out of Greece and the islands before the front closed behind them, and a British Aegean Force of escort carriers and cruisers was assembled at Alexandria to make that as difficult as possible.

Emperor joined it with Hunter, Stalker, Attacker, Searcher, Pursuer and Khedive.

What followed was two months of small, awkward, useful work. Operation Outing I between 14 and 21 September put twenty-four armed reconnaissance sorties over Milos and its shipping. Outing II at the end of the month went for the airfield at Maleme on Crete.

On 8 October she sailed with Royalist for anti-shipping sweeps and her Hellcats dive-bombed the radar station at Plimiri on Rhodes out of existence. Six days later she was at sea again for Operation Manna, the Allied occupation of Athens.

Then, on 19 October, Emperor did something no carrier is designed for. She anchored off the island of Khios and embarked prisoners of war, German and Italian, one account putting the number at 113, while eight of her Hellcats were away dive-bombing and destroying the radar station on Milos.

A ship built to fly twenty fighters spent the day as a floating prison and a strike carrier at the same time, which is not in any manual.

Her last Mediterranean operation, Contempt, ran from 26 October to 5 November and covered the re-occupation of Milos, including spotting for the bombardment carried out by the battleship HMS King George V (41). One account credits Emperor with 455 sorties during the operation, more than double any other carrier present.

She sailed for home on 20 November and reached Newport in Monmouthshire on the 29th for a refit, and on 17 January 1945 Captain Hilken handed her over to Captain Sir Charles Madden.

East Indies: Photographs, Rangoon and a Coast to Burn

Refitted by 25 February 1945 and allocated on 1 March to the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron of the East Indies Fleet, she went out through Suez and reached Colombo on 25 March with 800 Squadron's Hellcats aboard. Her war changed shape completely.

In Norway and the Aegean she had been a fighter carrier hunting ships and aircraft. In the Bay of Bengal she became, among other things, a camera.

Operation Sunfish in early April sent her with Khedive to photograph Port Swettenham and the Malayan ports, with a bombardment of Sabang on the 11th and strikes on Emmahaven and Padang. Later that month came Operation Dracula, the assault on Rangoon, where Emperor formed part of the escort to the main assault convoy with Hunter, Stalker and Khedive.

The convoy sailed on 30 April and the landing at the start of May was unopposed, which is the best possible outcome and makes for a very short paragraph. Released on 4 May, she spent the following days attacking the Tenasserim coast instead.

Five Hundred and Thirty Miles There and Back

On 10 May 1945 the East Indies Fleet went to sea after a Japanese force attempting to evacuate the Andaman Islands, an operation called Dukedom. The heavy cruiser Haguro was the prize.

Four escort carriers went out, and one of them, HMS Shah, promptly suffered a defect in her accelerator, the catapult without which a loaded Avenger could not get off her deck at all.

The solution, signalled on 11 May, was pure improvisation: Shah was to fly off 851 Squadron's Avengers with minimum fuel and no armament whatsoever and send them across to Emperor, which she did, the transfer complete by four o'clock that afternoon. Emperor thereby became the only carrier in the operation able to put a strike aircraft over the Japanese force, flying somebody else's squadron.

At half past seven on the morning of 15 May she launched four Avengers, each carrying four 500lb bombs, with the callsigns Duty Able, Baker, Charlie and Dog. At 0937 Duty Charlie found the Japanese force.

A second strike went off at 1004, and at ten to two in the afternoon she ranged a third, three aircraft under the callsigns Duty Peter, Queen and Roger, which attacked the cruiser at about twenty to four. The aircrew came home believing they had put one bomb into her and a near miss alongside. In fact all twelve missed.

They had nonetheless flown a 530-mile round trip to make the attack, the longest attacking flight any Fleet Air Arm aircraft made in the war, and it was the first dive-bombing attack the Fleet Air Arm had pressed home against a major warship since the sinking of the Konigsberg in April 1940. Escort carriers in the East Indies did not carry torpedoes, so 500lb bombs and a very long way to fly was what there was.

The point of the flight was never really the bombs. It was that somebody had found the Haguro and reported where she was going.

Shortly after one o'clock the next morning the destroyers of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla ran her down in the Malacca Strait and sank her with torpedoes, an action told from the destroyers' end in the articles on HMS Venus (F50), HMS Verulam (F29), HMS Vigilant and HMS Rapid (F138), with HMS Roebuck (F195) in the covering force and Royalist coordinating the search.

Five destroyers found a heavy cruiser in the dark in a strait a hundred and eighty miles long, and they could only do it because a borrowed Avenger had flown out that morning and come back with a position. The bombs were beside the point. The sighting report was the whole operation.

Collie, Zipper and a Harbour Full of Ships

Operation Collie between 2 and 11 July took her back out with HMS Ameer to strike the Nicobar Islands and cover minesweeping off Phuket. She returned to Ceylon on 19 July and 800 Squadron went ashore to Katukurunda.

A fleet sortie towards Penang and Medan was ordered on 10 August and cancelled almost at once, the Japanese having surrendered while it was still forming up, which must have been an odd signal to read on the bridge.

Her last operation was Operation Zipper, the reoccupation of Malaya and Singapore. She left Trincomalee on 4 September with Ameer, Empress, Hunter, Khedive and Stalker, was off Singapore on the 6th, and on 10 September anchored in Keppel Harbour with Hunter, Khedive and Stalker.

Around ninety ships were present for the formal Japanese surrender on 12 September. Empress was there too, and her own account of the Bay of Bengal is in her article.

Handed Back

She flew 800 Squadron's aircraft ashore to Coimbatore in southern India on 18 September, left the East Indies Fleet on 30 October, and came home to the Clyde on 4 December 1945 with the squadron's personnel aboard as passengers. 800 Squadron was formally disbanded as it left the ship, which is a tidy way of ending a partnership that had lasted from December 1943 to the end of the war.

Emperor went round to Plymouth on 8 January 1946 to have her British equipment stripped out, sailed from the United Kingdom for the last time on 23 January, and was handed back to the United States Navy at Norfolk, Virginia on 12 February 1946. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 28 March and sold on 14 May to the Patapsco Scrap Corporation of Baltimore.

Pursuer went to the same firm. Two ships that had flown fighters over Kaafjord and the Riviera were cut up by the same scrap merchant within months of each other.

Her battle honours read Atlantic 1943 to 1944, Norway 1944, Aegean 1944, Normandy 1944, South France 1944, Malaya 1945, East Indies 1945 and Burma 1945. Eight honours in two years and six months of British service, which is a rate very few ships of any size have matched.

What She Was For

It is easy to be condescending about escort carriers. They were slow, they were small, they were built from a cargo ship design in a hurry, and none of them ever fought the kind of action that gets painted.

Emperor could make eighteen knots on a good day, carried between eighteen and twenty-four aircraft, and had a ship's company of 646 including her air group.

What that bought was the ability to put a squadron of first-rate fighters anywhere the Admiralty needed one, at a fraction of the cost and building time of a fleet carrier.

In the space of nineteen months, Emperor's aircraft strafed flak positions in a Norwegian fjord so that the Barracudas could get at the Tirpitz, shot Focke-Wulfs out of the sky over the Norwegian coast, covered the invasion beaches of southern France, destroyed German radar stations in the Dodecanese while carrying prisoners of war in her own hangar, photographed the Malayan coast, escorted the assault convoy into Rangoon, and flew the longest attacking sortie the Fleet Air Arm ever mounted.

She did all of it on a hull that had been ordered as a merchant ship, under a name borrowed from an Alaskan bay, and when it was over she was sold to a scrap yard in Baltimore for whatever the steel was worth. That is not a sad ending.

That is exactly what she was built for, and the remarkable thing is how much she managed to do first.