HMS Empress (D42): Reconnaissance and Raids Across the Bay of Bengal

Built in Seattle, Transferred Under Lend-Lease

HMS Empress began life as USS Carnegie, an Ameer-class escort carrier built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation in Seattle, Washington. She was laid down on 9 September 1942, launched on 31 December 1942, and commissioned into the United States Navy on 9 August 1943, only to be transferred to the Royal Navy under the lend-lease programme just days later, becoming HMS Empress.

At 492 feet long with a beam of nearly 70 feet, she was a purpose-built escort carrier rather than a converted merchant hull, one of a considerable number of American-built escort carriers that supplemented the Royal Navy's own carrier strength through lend-lease, giving Britain access to a class of ship it simply did not have the shipyard capacity to build for itself in sufficient numbers during the war.

It is worth being clear about what one of these ships actually was, because escort carrier covers a very wide range of sins. Empress was built to mercantile standards on a merchant hull form, made about eighteen knots on a good day, carried something in the order of twenty aircraft and had no armoured flight deck, no side armour worth the name and very little in the way of the compartmentation a fleet carrier took for granted. She was cheap, she was quick to build, and the Americans turned them out in numbers Britain could not have approached. What she was not was survivable. Everything the Royal Navy asked of her in 1945 depended on her not being found by anything serious, which is precisely why she spent her war doing reconnaissance and hit-and-run strikes rather than standing in a line of battle.

Commander Thomas Neville Masterman took command upon her transfer, serving until November 1943, when Acting Captain Henry Austin Traill assumed command, remaining in charge through to April 1945, overseeing the carrier during her most active period of the war.

Across the Atlantic and Into the Indian Ocean

HMS Empress's early movements took her across the Americas and Atlantic before she found her way to the theatre where she would do her most significant work.

In March 1944, she departed Cristobal in the Panama Canal Zone on the 11th, escorted by destroyer escorts and corvettes, arriving at Norfolk, Virginia on 17 March, part of the constant shuffling of ships and convoys that characterised the Allied war effort's logistical backbone.

That single line covers over a year in which she did nothing warlike whatsoever, and it is worth filling in, because it is what most of these ships actually did with their war. She was handed over at Vancouver on 10 August 1943 and then spent ninety-nine days at the Burrard Dry Dock being turned from an American ship into a British one, a process set out at length in the article on HMS Atheling (D51). It did not go smoothly. Her low pressure turbine rotor had to go back to the manufacturer, the replacement did not arrive until 9 November, and she was not finished until 6 December.

Then she went to work as a lorry. She sailed from Vancouver on 17 February 1944 with a deck and hangar full of lend-lease aircraft, broke down badly enough to need engine repairs at San Diego, came through the Panama Canal and up to Norfolk, went on to New York, and left there on 28 March with convoy CU.19, reaching Greenock on 8 April and putting her aeroplanes ashore. From 11 April she was a training carrier for Western Approaches Command, steaming up and down off the Clyde while trainee pilots of 768 Squadron flew out from RNAS Abbotsinch, and later RNAS Ayr, to practise the single hardest thing a naval aviator ever has to do. What that felt like is described in the article on HMS Activity (D94), who did the same job on the same water.

By November 1944 they had raised the stakes considerably: night deck landing training, with Swordfish of 766 Squadron and Fireflies of 1772. A carrier deck at night is a few dim lights and a batsman with illuminated wands, on a ship that is pitching, with no horizon and nothing underneath but the Firth of Clyde in winter. She had four accidents that month alone. Sub-Lieutenant Kineham had two of them, on the 14th and the 17th, the second taking the tail off his aircraft; Sub-Lieutenant O'Driscoll went into the barrier on the 25th and Midshipman Hubble into it again on the 26th. Nobody in the Admiralty counted this as operational service. It was, all the same, how the Fleet Air Arm produced the pilots who would be flying off her in the Bay of Bengal four months later.

It was in the Indian Ocean theatre during 1945 that HMS Empress found her real purpose, supporting the British campaign to reclaim Burma and Malaya from Japanese occupation, a theatre that received considerably less attention at the time, and has received considerably less attention since, than the more famous Pacific island-hopping campaign, despite involving remarkably large fleets and hard-fought operations of its own.

The fleet she belonged to has been comprehensively overshadowed, including by the other British fleet fighting the same enemy. When the British Pacific Fleet was formed and sent east to fight alongside the Americans off Okinawa, it took the modern armoured carriers and the new battleships with it. What was left behind at Trincomalee as the East Indies Fleet was the older material: veteran battleships, a handful of cruisers and a squadron of escort carriers, given the job of blinding the Japanese in the Bay of Bengal, softening the Andamans and Nicobars, photographing the beaches for the Malayan landings and covering the advance on Rangoon. It is often called the Forgotten Fleet, and the label is well earned; a great many people who know what happened at Leyte Gulf have never heard of Operation Bishop. Empress is a fair sample of it: an American-built escort carrier flying American-built fighters for a British admiral against Japanese airfields on islands most people in Britain could not have found on a map.

The fighters were flown by 804 Naval Air Squadron, and the squadron had a considerably more distinguished record than the ship. It formed on 30 November 1939 with Sea Gladiators, biplanes with fixed undercarriages, and in the autumn of 1940 became the first squadron anywhere in the world to be issued with the Grumman Martlet, the aircraft the Americans called the Wildcat. On Christmas Day 1940, flying from RNAS Skaebrae in Orkney, two of its Martlets brought down a Junkers Ju 88 over Scapa Flow. That was the first aerial victory scored by any F4F anywhere, in any service, and the first ever won in British hands by an American-built aeroplane. Lieutenant L. V. Carter and Sub-Lieutenant A. Parker shared it.

The following year the squadron took on the least survivable flying job of the war. The Royal Navy commissioned five Fighter Catapult Ships under the White Ensign, Pegasus, Maplin, Ariguani, Patia and Springbank, each carrying a single Sea Hurricane on a rocket catapult, and 804 provided the pilots. The idea was the same as the merchant CAM ships that followed them: fire one fighter off the bow at a shadowing Condor and let the pilot sort out the landing afterwards, there being no deck to come back to. The ships themselves lasted no time at all. Patia was bombed and sunk in April 1941 before she ever embarked an aircraft, Springbank was torpedoed in September and Ariguani in October, and Pegasus was sent to training duties in July, which left Maplin doing the entire job on her own.

It was from Maplin, on 3 August 1941, that Lieutenant R. W. H. Everett RNVR was shot off the bow to defend convoy OG 70. Everett was not a professional airman; he was a steeplechase jockey who had won the 1929 Grand National on Gregalach at a hundred to one in a field of sixty-six, the largest ever run. He caught the Condor, was hit hard, put the last of his ammunition into it and watched it go down in flames, then brought his ruined Hurricane down in the sea alongside the destroyer HMS Wanderer and was pulled out. It was the first kill ever made by a catapult-launched fighter, and the King gave him the DSO for it in September. He did not see 1942 out: on 26 January he was ferrying a Hurricane from Belfast to Abingdon when it came down in the shallows off Red Wharf Bay in Anglesey, and he drowned. He lies in the churchyard at Llanddona.

Hellcats came in August 1943, and by 1945 the squadron was shuttling between Emperor, Ameer, Empress and Shah, which is how it came to be sitting in this ship's hangar off the Nicobars. It was disbanded in November 1945, six years and three continents after the Sea Gladiators.

Reconnaissance, Raids, and Rangoon

Vice-Admiral Harold Thomas Coulthard Walker established his flag aboard HMS Empress on 12 February 1945, giving her a role as a command platform even before her most active operations got under way.

Walker is worth a moment, partly because of what he had already survived and partly because of the nickname. Naval tradition hands every man called Walker the name Hooky, whether he wants it or not; this one had earned it the hard way. Born on 18 March 1891, the son of a lieutenant-general, he joined as a midshipman in 1908 and spent the First World War in the battleship HMS Bellerophon and then in HMS Vindictive, the ship that went alongside the mole at Zeebrugge. He was wounded, lost a hand, and wore a hook for the rest of his life. He was mentioned in despatches twice.

Between the wars he had the cruiser Canterbury, and from May 1938 to January 1939 he was Flag Captain of HMS Hood, the most admired ship in the world, under Andrew Cunningham and then Geoffrey Layton. Promoted Vice-Admiral in December 1944, he became Flag Officer Commanding the 3rd Battle Squadron and second-in-command of the East Indies Station, and his proper flagship was the twenty-nine-year-old battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth.

So when he shifted his flag into Empress in February 1945 he was moving from the Grand Fleet's idea of a warship into a Seattle-built merchant hull with a wooden flight deck, for the straightforward reason that the operation in hand was about aeroplanes and that was where the aeroplanes were. There is no better single illustration of what had happened to naval warfare in the twenty-six years since he lost his hand. He was knighted in January 1946, finished as a full admiral on the retired list, and died at Woking on Christmas Day 1975.

HMS Empress then flew Operation Stacey between 22 February and 7 March 1945, a photographic reconnaissance mission covering Penang, the Kra Isthmus and northern Sumatra, vital intelligence-gathering work ahead of planned amphibious operations further along the coast. She sailed as part of Force 62 alongside her sister carrier HMS Ameer, the light cruiser HMS Kenya, six destroyers and six frigates, and the mission proved a sharp one for the fleet's fighters too: three Japanese aircraft were shot down for no loss of their own.

It is worth knowing who was actually in her hangar for that, because Stacey was not a fighter operation with a camera bolted on. She sailed as flagship with twelve Avengers of 845 Squadron, six photographic-reconnaissance Hellcats of 888 Squadron and four fighter Hellcats of 804. The PR Hellcats were the point of the whole exercise: stripped of most of their armament, fitted with cameras, and flown straight and level at a set height and speed over a defended coastline for as long as it took to get the overlapping runs the photographic interpreters needed. It is the least evasive thing an aircraft can do and it has to be done properly or the sortie is wasted.

The three aircraft shot down were the fighters keeping the Japanese off them, and one of the encounters is on record: at 1045 on 1 March two of Empress's aircraft went after a Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar and it dived into the sea. The operation also cost her two aircraft without any help from the enemy at all, an Avenger and a Hellcat both written off in deck crashes on 26 February, which was a fairly ordinary week's attrition for an escort carrier and a reminder that on a ship this size the deck was as dangerous as the target.

HMS Empress then took part in Operation Bishop between 27 April and 9 May 1945, a much larger effort by Force 63, which put to sea from Trincomalee, Ceylon on 27 April under Vice-Admiral Walker, who had shifted his flag back into the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth for it. Empress had a new commanding officer by then: Captain John Ronald Stewart Brown had relieved Traill on 16 April, a fortnight before the operation opened.

The force spent twelve days carrying out carrier raids and bombardment against Car Nicobar and Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, opening on 30 April with a dawn bombardment and Hellcat strikes on both airfields at Car Nicobar, followed that evening by strikes on Port Blair and a repeat attack on Car Nicobar. Malacca was hit on 1 May and Port Blair again on 2 May, before a final strike closed out the operation against Car Nicobar airfield on 7 May; remarkably, only one aircraft was lost across the whole twelve days.

On 6 May, aircraft from Empress and her sister ship HMS Shah, both part of the 21st Carrier Squadron and escorted by the destroyers Virago, Tartar and Nubian, struck shipping in Port Blair harbour, one part of a wider effort that also provided air cover for the amphibious landings at Rangoon, the successful operation that recaptured Burma's capital from Japanese forces.

The one aircraft lost during those twelve days had a name attached to it. On 6 May, in the strikes on Port Blair harbour, Sub Lieutenant (A) J. A. Scott RNVR took anti-aircraft fire, and his Hellcat, JX803, went into the sea off Empress's port bow. He was killed. It is a single line in the operational record of an operation that was itself only a diversion, mounted to keep Japanese attention away from the real landing at Rangoon, and it is the sort of death that disappears entirely into a phrase like only one aircraft was lost.

She followed this with Operation Livery between 19 and 30 July 1945, combining minesweeping operations off Phuket with air strikes against targets on the Kra Isthmus, her aircraft destroying three small ships and damaging railway infrastructure supporting the Japanese war effort in the region.

Operation Livery deserves more than a line, because Empress was present at the end of something. Force 63 sailed with the battleship Nelson, Empress and her sister Ameer, the cruiser Sussex and four destroyers, covering the 7th Minesweeping Flotilla while it cleared the approaches to Phuket. On 24 July the minesweeper Squirrel was mined and had to be sunk. On the 26th Japanese suicide aircraft came in; one of them, making for the minesweeper Plucky, turned at the last moment and hit HMS Vestal amidships. She burned, heeled over, was abandoned, and then blew up, taking twenty of her people with her. Vestal was the only British ship sunk by a kamikaze in the whole war and the last Royal Navy ship of any kind lost to enemy action in the Second World War. Twenty-four mines were swept for the loss of two minesweepers, and Livery was the final offensive operation the Eastern Fleet ever mounted. Three weeks later the war was over.

A final operation, Carson, was planned for 10 August 1945, intended as a further round of attacks on shipping and airfields near Penang and Medan, but was postponed as Japanese surrender negotiations overtook events, HMS Empress's war ending not with one last strike but with the news that no further strikes would be needed.

There was still work to do even with the shooting over. In September 1945 she took part in Operation Zipper, the Allied reoccupation of Malaya, before switching to considerably gentler duties: trooping voyages to Melbourne and Wellington that October and November, carrying servicemen home as part of the vast demobilisation effort, followed by a return passage to the United Kingdom between 27 November and 19 December 1945.

There is one thread running through all of this that the record keeps returning to, and it is the catapult. An escort carrier makes about eighteen knots flat out, which on a still day in the tropics gives a heavily loaded Avenger nowhere near enough wind over the deck to fly off unassisted. The hydraulic catapult is not a convenience on a ship like this; it is the difference between an aircraft carrier and a large flat-topped merchantman.

When she came back into Trincomalee on 30 March 1945 her Flight Deck Officer reported that the main cable working the catapult was close to failing outright, and there was no replacement cable anywhere on the island. There is a persistent story that one was in fact sitting in the naval stores at the time but was so badly marked that nobody knew it was there, which, if true, is about as good a summary of wartime supply as anyone could ask for. She went to sea for Bishop, and for Livery, on a catapult everybody knew was living on borrowed time.

It finally let go on 8 September 1945, during Operation Zipper, and this time the failure was catastrophic. She turned round and went back to Trincomalee, and on 13 September she flew 896 Squadron's Hellcats off for the last time. The war was over by then and it made no difference to anything, which is perhaps the kindest ending available: the one piece of equipment her whole usefulness depended on held together exactly long enough, and broke the moment it no longer mattered.

Returned to the United States

HMS Empress's service with the Royal Navy came to an end on 4 February 1946, when she was formally returned to United States Navy custody as USS Carnegie once more, in keeping with the terms of the lend-lease arrangement under which so many American-built ships had served British colours for the duration of the war without ever changing permanent ownership.

She was struck from the American naval register on 28 March 1946 and sold for scrap on 21 June that year, a quiet administrative end to a carrier whose brief but properly useful service had helped keep the British campaign in Burma and Malaya supplied with intelligence, air cover and offensive striking power at exactly the moments it was needed most.