HMS Fencer (D64): Four U-Boats Sunk, and a Secret Bouncing Bomb Carried to Australia
She Began Life as a Freighter Called Croatan
HMS Fencer was laid down on 5 September 1941 at the Western Pipe and Steel Corporation in San Francisco, and she was not meant to be a warship at all. She was a Maritime Commission C3 hull, the standard American merchant type of the period, and the plan was a cargo ship.
The plan changed while she was still on the slip. She went down the ways on 4 April 1942 as USS Croatan, was completed on 20 February 1943, and a week later, on 27 February, she was handed to Britain under Lend-Lease. On 1 March 1943 she commissioned as HMS Fencer, pennant number D64.
The United States Navy then gave the name Croatan to a different escort carrier altogether, which is the sort of administrative shrug that happens when a country is turning out warships faster than it can think of names for them.
It was a naming convention with a certain amount of front to it, given that the ships themselves were converted freighters that could just about manage eighteen knots downhill. The second batch, the Rulers, produced HMS Emperor (D98) and HMS Khedive (D62) and went in for grandeur instead.
She reached New York on 2 May 1943, joined convoy HX 238 on the 7th and crossed to Liverpool, where she spent June in a shipyard being made British. That meant British radar, British signalling gear and British ammunition arrangements, because an American-built carrier arrived unable to talk properly to the fleet she was joining.
She worked up in the Clyde in August with the Swordfish and Wildcats of 842 Squadron aboard, and 842 would stay with her for a year almost to the day.
Portugal, an Airfield, and a Treaty From 1373
Her first operation was not a battle. It was a diplomatic manoeuvre with an escort carrier attached.
By 1943 the mid-Atlantic gap, the stretch of ocean beyond the reach of land-based aircraft, was the single most useful thing the U-boat arm had. The Azores sat in the middle of it, and they belonged to Portugal, which was neutral.
What Portugal also had was the Treaty of Windsor of 1373, an alliance with England that had by then been running for five hundred and seventy years and had never been formally broken. In August 1943 Salazar agreed to lease bases in the islands to Britain, and in October Churchill stood up in the Commons and read out the terms of a fourteenth-century treaty to explain why British forces were landing on neutral soil.
Operation Alacrity was the result. Fencer sailed from Liverpool on 30 September 1943 with the 8th Escort Group, in company with the troopship Franconia and a collection of destroyers, trawlers and landing craft, carrying the RAF party that was going to build the airfield.
She had 700W Flight aboard, Swordfish and a Walrus amphibian, embarked on 25 September. The force reached Terceira on 8 October, the aircraft went ashore to Lajes, and construction began on a six-thousand-foot runway from which Coastal Command could finally fly into the middle of the gap.
It cost her a crew before the ships had even arrived. On 7 October Swordfish HS623 ran out of fuel and ditched, and Sub-Lieutenant T D Merrick RNVR, Sub-Lieutenant J B Simpson RNVR and Petty Officer Airman R Morgan were killed. A second Swordfish went into the sea on the 11th and her crew were pulled out alive.
On 20 November, back in home waters, Sub-Lieutenant J M Kay RNVR stalled Wildcat JV385 on the approach; the aircraft sank and he was not recovered. Four men dead, and not a shot fired at the ship.
A Condor Over Convoy OS 60
On 1 December 1943, covering the outward convoy OS 60 south-west of Ireland, two of her Wildcats caught a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor and shot it down at 48 degrees 30 minutes north, 18 degrees 30 minutes west. Lieutenant L C Wort RNVR was flying JV344 and Lieutenant R A Fleischmann-Allen RNVR was flying JV427.
The Condor was a converted airliner with a long range and a bad reputation. Its job was not usually to attack the convoy but to find it, circle out of gun range, and report the position, course and speed by wireless so that the U-boats could be vectored on. Shooting one down did not merely remove an aeroplane.
It removed the convoy from the map. That is what escort carriers were for in the first place, and it is why a ship that never once launched a torpedo strike earned a battle honour for the Atlantic.
The Boat That Killed HMS Itchen
On 10 February 1944, escorting the Atlantic convoys again with the 16th Escort Group, Swordfish LS368 flown by Sub-Lieutenant W H Thomson RNVR found U-666 on the surface and sank her with depth charges at 53 degrees 56 minutes north, 17 degrees 16 minutes west. All fifty-one men aboard were lost. Thomson was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
U-666 had sunk exactly one ship in four patrols, and it was a British warship. In the small hours of 23 September 1943, in the running battle around the joined convoys ONS 18 and ON 202, she put a torpedo into the frigate HMS Itchen.
Itchen blew up and broke in half, and she went down carrying not only her own ship's company but the rescued survivors of the corvette HMS Polyanthus and the Canadian destroyer HMCS St Croix, whom she had picked up over the preceding days. Three men came out of the water alive.
That battle is told from the escort commander's end in the article on HMS Keppel (D84), and the reason the escorts had suddenly become the targets rather than the shield is explained in HMS Escapade (H17).
None of Fencer's crew would have known any of that on 10 February. They had a radar contact, a surfaced boat and a clear run in. It is only from a distance that the arithmetic joins up.
Tungsten, From the Boring End
She sailed from Scapa Flow on 30 March 1944 as part of the fleet sent to attack the German battleship Tirpitz in Altafjord, and she has almost nothing to show for it. Fencer was in Force 8, the anti-submarine group, and her Swordfish spent 2 to 5 April flying patrols round the fleet looking for U-boats that never appeared. She was back at Scapa on the 6th.
Operation Tungsten was the most successful carrier strike the Royal Navy mounted in European waters, and the Barracudas that did it flew from HMS Furious (47) and HMS Victorious (R38), with the fighters coming off the escort carriers and HMS Royalist (C89) leading them out. It is told at length in Royalist's article and Pursuer's, and HMS Diadem (84) covers the cruiser screen.
The point worth making here is the one nobody puts on a battle honours board. A striking force can only fly its strike if something else is keeping the submarines off it, and the ship doing that work sees nothing, claims nothing and gets a line in an appendix.
The April follow-up, Operation Pitchbowl, was cancelled outright because of the weather. That was a fortnight of Fencer's war, and the record of it is two dates and a shrug.
Thirty-Six Hours Off Jan Mayen
Then came the fortnight that made her name.
In late April she went to the Kola Inlet in northern Russia, and on 28 April 1944 she sailed with convoy RA 59 for home. It was an enormous convoy and it was carrying an unusual cargo of people rather than freight, including a Soviet admiral travelling in Fencer herself on his way to take delivery of a British battleship.
That side of it is told in the article on HMS Ulysses (F17), one of the destroyers in the screen, and the battleship's own strange career under the Soviet flag is in HMS Royal Sovereign (05).
Two patrol lines of U-boats were waiting. On 30 April they got one ship, the American freighter William S Thayer, torpedoed by U-307. Over the next thirty-six hours Fencer's Swordfish destroyed three of the boats hunting her.
On 1 May, south-west of Bear Island at 73 degrees 24 minutes north, 15 degrees 32 minutes east, Swordfish LS369 sank U-277. The pilot was Sub-Lieutenant L G Cooper RNVR and the observer Lieutenant R V Barnes RNVR, both later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, with Petty Officer Airman K Sutherland receiving the Distinguished Service Medal.
U-277 had been at sea for six patrols under Kapitänleutnant Robert Lübsen and had never sunk anything. Fifty men were lost with her.
On 2 May, east of Jan Mayen Island at 70 degrees 32 minutes north, 4 degrees 37 minutes east, another of her Swordfish sank U-674, commanded by Oberleutnant Harald Muhs. Three patrols, no ships sunk, forty-nine dead.
Later the same day, to the south-east of the island at 69 degrees 20 minutes north, 0 degrees 20 minutes west, they sank U-959 under Oberleutnant Friedrich Weitz. Two patrols, no ships sunk, fifty-three dead.
Sub-Lieutenant B F Vibert RNVR was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for that one, flying with Lieutenant E I Hutchinson RNVR and Petty Officer Airman M A Thackeray. Rockets and depth charges were both used across the two attacks on the 2nd, and the sources cannot agree which boat got which.
Three submarines in a day and a half. Add U-666 in February and Fencer's aircraft had sunk four U-boats, and every one of them went down with all hands: two hundred and three men in total, and not a single survivor from any of the four. Three of the boats had never sunk anything at all.
It was not unprecedented. HMS Chaser, one of her own sisters, had taken three U-boats out of convoy RA 57 two months earlier. But it is worth pausing on what the crews were doing it in.
The Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit, and the men flying it over the Norwegian Sea in May were sitting in the wind at a hundred knots at seventy-three degrees north, in an aeroplane the Air Ministry had wanted to retire before the war started. Why it kept working when it should not have is argued out properly in the article on HMS Activity (D94), which was on the same run.
What can be said here is narrower and colder: three crews found three boats in thirty-six hours in some of the worst flying weather on earth, and none of the three boats got away.
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Talking to Nobody Off Norway
In June 1944 she and Striker were sent north for Operation Wanderers, steaming up towards the Norwegian coast and filling the air with invented wireless traffic to persuade the German high command that a second landing was coming at them from above the Arctic Circle while the real one was consolidating in Normandy. No U-boats were sighted and nothing was attacked.
The deception is described from Striker's deck in her own article.
She spent July and August back on the Gibraltar convoy routes, and on 22 August 842 Squadron flew off her for the last time. They had been aboard for a year, and they had sunk four submarines and shot down a Condor.
Autumn brought Operation Tenable, abandoned because of the weather, and Operation Lycidas in the middle of October, in which Avengers flew off her to lay mines along the Norwegian coast on the 15th and 16th.
That was the end of her fighting career, and she was nineteen months old.
The Other Bouncing Bomb
What happened next is the strangest thing she ever did, and almost nobody has heard of it.
Barnes Wallis is remembered for Upkeep, the cylindrical bouncing bomb that broke the Ruhr dams in May 1943. He had designed a second one at the same time.
Highball was smaller and roughly spherical, weighed about 1,280lb, and was meant to be dropped in pairs from a Mosquito against warships: bounce it across the water, let it strike the hull below the waterline and detonate there.
It was intended in the first instance for the Tirpitz. 618 Squadron RAF was formed to carry it, and was then kept in existence, fully trained and armed, for the better part of two years without ever being sent against anything, because the political and operational objections to using it always outweighed the appeal of a secret weapon that could only be used once before the surprise was gone.
In late 1944 somebody decided to try the Japanese fleet instead, and 618 Squadron was sent to Australia. Fencer and Striker took them.
Loading began at King George V Dock in Glasgow on 25 October 1944, the Mosquitoes craned aboard by floating crane and lashed down as deck cargo rather than struck below, because an escort carrier's lift was never built for a twin-engined bomber with a fifty-four-foot wingspan. By 28 October the squadron's records show twenty-four Mark IVs and three photographic Mark XVIs embarked between the two ships.
The personnel came aboard on the 30th, split half and half between the two carriers, and they sailed from the Clyde on 31 October. Trincomalee on 22 November, and Melbourne on 23 December 1944.
The aircraft went to Fishermans Bend to be put back together, the squadron moved up to Narromine in New South Wales in January 1945, and there it sat.
The Japanese heavy units it had crossed the world to attack never came within range, the argument between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy about who would authorise the operation was never resolved, and 618 Squadron was disbanded on 21 July 1945 having never dropped a Highball in anger. Fencer had carried a secret weapon to the other side of the world so that it could sit in a paddock in New South Wales.
A Very Long Way From the Arctic
She stayed east and spent the first half of 1945 as a ferry carrier, running replacement aircraft between Ceylon, Australia and the forward anchorages, attached to the British Fleet Train supporting the Pacific Fleet, with calls at Cochin, Leyte, Manus and Hollandia.
It was unglamorous, essential and entirely without incident, which after the previous eighteen months her ship's company can only have regarded as a considerable improvement.
She docked at Simon's Town in South Africa in July, went back to Trincomalee, sailed from Ceylon on 4 September and reached the Clyde on the 25th.
She paid off from operational service at the end of the month and went into a London yard to be converted for trooping, with accommodation put in for a thousand ratings and sixty officers at a recorded cost of £17,766, which even in 1945 money is a remarkably cheap way to acquire a troopship. She spent 1946 carrying servicemen home from Ceylon and the Mediterranean.
The sources disagree on how many voyages she made, and on the exact date late in 1946 when she was handed back to the United States Navy at Norfolk, Virginia, with four different accounts giving four different days.
Twenty Years of Taking People to Melbourne
In December 1947 she was sold to Flotta Lauro of Naples, and this is where she becomes a different ship entirely. Most escort carriers went back to being freighters, which is what Khedive did for thirty years. Fencer did not.
Her flight deck came off and she was rebuilt at Naples as a proper two-class passenger liner, and she emerged as the Sydney. Her sister Atheling had the same treatment and became the Roma.
She made her maiden voyage in September 1951, and for the next two decades she ran Italian emigrants from Genoa to Fremantle, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Tens of thousands of people had their first sight of Australia over the rail of a ship that had been built as a freighter, converted into a warship, used to hunt submarines in the Arctic and then used to smuggle a secret weapon halfway round the world.
She was sold on through a run of owners in the late 1960s and early 1970s and worked her last years as a cruise ship under a succession of names, Roma and Galaxy Queen and Lady Dina and Caribia, the exact order and dates of which the sources will not settle between them. She went to the breakers at La Spezia in 1975.
There is a neatness to it that no one planned. In December 1944 she came into Melbourne with half of a squadron of Mosquitoes lashed to her deck, and a bomb that was never used.
Seven years later she came back to the same port with a few hundred families and their luggage, and kept doing it until she was thirty-three years old.
Four Honours and Two Hundred and Three Men
Her battle honours read Atlantic 1943 to 1944, Norway 1944, North Sea 1944 and Arctic 1944.
She was in commission as a warship for three and a half years and she was in action for about one of them. She never launched a strike against a ship, never fought a surface action and never carried more than a couple of dozen aircraft.
What she did was find submarines and kill them, four times, with biplanes, in weather that should have kept everybody on deck; and the men who did it were reserve officers in their twenties with a petty officer in the back seat.
Two hundred and three Germans died in those four boats and three of the boats had never sunk a thing. That is not a triumphant number and it is not meant to be.
It is simply what the Battle of the Atlantic actually consisted of by 1944: a converted cargo ship with an obsolete aeroplane on the roof, doing the arithmetic until it came out right.
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