HMS Hunter (D80): The Salerno Carrier That Taught Its Pilots How to Land

A Freighter Called Mormacpenn

HMS Hunter was never meant to fly anything. Her keel was laid at the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation at Pascagoula, Mississippi on 15 May 1941 as SS Mormacpenn, a Maritime Commission C3 type freighter ordered for the Moore-McCormack Lines, and if the war had gone differently she would have spent her life carrying cargo between American ports and South America.

Instead the United States Navy bought her for conversion, designated her the auxiliary aircraft carrier AVG-8, and intended to call her USS Block Island. She was launched on 22 May 1942 under that name, and then the name was taken off her again when it became clear she was going to Britain, and given to a different hull.

She was commissioned into the Royal Navy at Pascagoula on 11 January 1943 as HMS Hunter, pennant number D80, under Captain H H McWilliam.

She belonged to what the Royal Navy called the Attacker class, and the distinction is worth making because it is easy to get wrong. The Attackers came from Ingalls at Pascagoula and from Western Pipe and Steel in California.

The Ruler class, which includes HMS Emperor (D98) and HMS Khedive (D62), came without exception from Seattle-Tacoma. Hunter fought alongside both of those ships repeatedly, but she was not a sister to either of them.

Her name came with a debt attached. The Royal Navy logs her as Hunter (ii), because the previous HMS Hunter, the H-class destroyer H35, had been sunk nine months earlier at the First Battle of Narvik.

On 10 April 1940, having taken the lead of the British line in Ofotfjord, she was disabled by German gunfire and probably a torpedo, and was then rammed from astern by HMS Hotspur, who was herself out of control with two hits aboard. Hunter capsized. One hundred and twelve of her people died.

Forty-six were pulled out of the water by the German destroyers they had just been fighting and released into Sweden three days later. Her wreck lay unfound until March 2008, when a Norwegian navy vessel located her, and she is now a war grave.

The new Hunter therefore went to sea carrying a name that had been in the water off Narvik for less than a year. Nobody aboard needed reminding what an escort carrier's flight deck was going to cost.

Trials, Swordfish and a Long Way to Dundee

She began post-build trials in the West Indies on 31 January 1943, made her first Atlantic crossing on 5 March with convoy UGF6, embarked a detachment of Swordfish from 813 Naval Air Squadron on 29 March, and reached Dundee on 12 April for the modifications the Royal Navy applied to every American-built carrier it was given.

On 17 August she sailed from the Clyde with convoy KMF22 and the Swordfish of 834 and the Seafires of 899 Squadron aboard, and on 5 September she joined Force V in the Mediterranean. Four days later she was off an Italian beach with the whole weight of an invasion resting on her flight deck.

Force V, and the Flattest Sea in the Mediterranean

Operation Avalanche, the landing at Salerno, was mounted just beyond the range at which Spitfires flying from Sicily could usefully loiter overhead. That gap had to be filled from the sea, and the ships sent to fill it were Force V under Rear Admiral Philip Vian: the support carrier HMS Unicorn (I72) and four escort carriers, Attacker, Battler, Stalker and Hunter.

Behind them, Force H had the fleet carriers HMS Illustrious (87) and HMS Formidable (67). The cruiser HMS Charybdis (88) carried Eisenhower himself towards the invasion.

The carriers left Gibraltar on 8 September and spent four days off the beachhead, from the 9th to the 12th. Between them they flew 713 sorties and provided more than half the Allied air cover over the landings, which for five small ships is a startling share of the work.

Hunter contributed twenty Seafires, drawn from 899 Squadron and the fighter flight of 834, along with her Swordfish.

It was also the operation at which the Germans first used radio-controlled bombs in the Mediterranean, weapons that were steered onto their targets rather than merely dropped near them. What those did to a battleship and to a cruiser is set out in the articles on HMS Warspite (03) and HMS Uganda (66), both of which were hit off Salerno, and there is no need to describe the Fritz X a third time here.

What ruined Force V was not the Germans. It was the weather, or rather the absence of any. The Bay of Salerno lay almost flat calm, an escort carrier could make eighteen knots on a good day, and a Seafire needs wind over the deck to come aboard at a survivable closing speed.

Unicorn's article tells that story in full, with the arithmetic of what it did to the fighter force, and it is one of the plainest lessons in the history of naval aviation.

The Ship That Practised

Here is the part that belongs to Hunter, and it is the reason this article exists.

Across Force V the Seafire squadrons flew 713 sorties and lost forty-two aircraft to accidents, not one of them to enemy action, with thirty-two of those written off in deck landing crashes. Undercarriages collapsed. Rear fuselages buckled.

Unicorn, the biggest and fastest ship in the force and in theory the best place to land, recorded twenty-one serious prangs in four days. By the third day the whole force had fewer than forty serviceable fighters left out of the number it had started with.

Hunter came through it with the fewest accidents of any carrier in the force. The reason recorded is not luck and not a better ship. It is that her people had put the pilots through intensive deck landing instruction before the operation, and that the instruction was given by her own commanding officer.

When the calm came and everybody else was breaking aeroplanes, the pilots who had been drilled hardest broke the fewest.

It is not a glamorous distinction. There is no battle honour for competent airmanship. But of all the things that separate one small carrier from another in September 1943, being the ship whose aircraft could still fly on the fourth day is close to the top of the list.

She lost exactly one aircraft to the enemy over the whole operation. A Seafire of 899 Squadron was badly shot up by gunfire ashore and force-landed, and its pilot, Sub-Lieutenant E G Elwell RNVR, was unhurt.

Another of her pilots, Sub-Lieutenant T H Johnson, went into the sea and was picked up by the American minesweeper YMS 227. On 11 September two of her Seafires went into the barrier, flown by Sub-Lieutenants G Steven and J Kirk, which is what the barrier is there for.

One useful thing did come out of the wreckage, and it is a beautiful example of the kind of fix that wins wars quietly. The mechanics worked out that when a Seafire caught a wire, the nose came down far enough for the propeller tips to clip the deck. So they cut two inches off the propellers.

The damage rate fell away sharply and nobody could detect any loss of performance at all.

A Hundred Telephones

She went back to Dundee at the end of September, put her squadrons ashore in October, and on 3 December did something faintly humiliating: she damaged her own hangar deck while being undocked. Repairs ran into the middle of January.

What happened alongside those repairs mattered a great deal more. Between October 1943 and January 1944 she was converted into a specialist assault carrier, and the shopping list tells you exactly what the Royal Navy had learned at Salerno. A new Type 277 radar.

Fourteen powered twin mountings in place of her hand-worked Oerlikons. A Briefing Room. An Army Plot room. And a new telephone system running to more than a hundred instruments.

A hundred telephones is not a detail about wiring. It is a statement about what the ship had become. A convoy escort carrier needs to talk to a handful of people: her own aircraft, her own bridge, the senior officer of the escort.

An assault carrier is running fighters over an army that is fighting on a beach, spotting for warships shelling targets nobody aboard can see, photographing ground the soldiers are about to walk across, and passing all of it to a headquarters ashore that changes its mind hourly. That takes an operations room, a chart of the land battle, and a switchboard.

Hunter spent the last eighteen months of the war being, in effect, a small floating airfield attached to somebody else's land campaign. Everything she did after January 1944 follows from those hundred telephones.

Dragoon: 307 Sorties in Thirteen Days

She embarked 807 Squadron with twenty-four Seafires and a single Swordfish, and in the summer of 1944 went to the Mediterranean for the invasion of the south of France. She was in Task Group 88.2 under the American Rear Admiral Durgin, alongside HMS Stalker and the United States escort carriers Tulagi and Kasaan Bay, within the wider Task Force 88 whose flagship was HMS Royalist (C89).

The other British group, 88.1, had Emperor, Khedive, HMS Pursuer (D73), Attacker and Searcher in it, and their side of the operation is told in their own articles.

Over thirteen days Hunter's single squadron flew 307 sorties and 485 hours and 10 minutes in the air. The breakdown is the interesting part: 96 sorties of force cover over the fleet, 56 of armed reconnaissance, 55 of gunfire spotting, 48 of beach cover over the troops, 36 of dive-bombing and 16 of tactical reconnaissance.

Fifty-five spotting missions from one small carrier is the Army Plot room and the telephone exchange earning their keep. Somebody aboard was talking to a battleship and to a forward observer at the same time, all day, for a fortnight.

It cost four aircraft and eleven deck landing accidents. Lieutenant L G Lloyd RNVR went in after attacking a German armed vessel: his Seafire was hit by fire from a flak ship, caught fire and dived into the sea.

Sub-Lieutenant G E Thomas RNVR lost contact with his flight over Saint-Laurent-la-Vernede and was never found.

The Worst Day Was a Landing

And then, on a ship whose whole reputation rested on knowing how to get aeroplanes back aboard, the worst thing that ever happened to her was an aeroplane coming back aboard.

Lieutenant E V Speakman RNVR had been attacking targets ashore and had taken flak damage. His Seafire could not lower its flaps, which means it could not be slowed down to a proper approach speed. He came aboard anyway, because the alternative in 1944 was to ditch alongside and hope.

The aircraft went out of control on the deck and brought down the high frequency direction finding nest, and six of her ratings were killed. The record names five of them: Air Fitter S T C Barter, Air Fitter W G P Peirce, Air Mechanic E F Pym, Ordinary Seaman J Pyke and Able Seaman W R Street. Speakman was killed too.

Deck parties stand where they stand because somebody has to be there to unhook the wire, chock the wheels and get the aircraft forward before the next one arrives ninety seconds later. They are unarmoured, unshielded and entirely dependent on the man in the cockpit getting it right.

A year earlier Hunter had been the ship that got it right more often than anybody else in the Mediterranean, and it made no difference at all to the six men standing on her deck on an August afternoon in 1944 when a Seafire with no flaps came over the rounddown.

The Aegean, Where a Carrier Was Used as a Tanker

From southern France she went to Force 120, the British Aegean Force, and spent the autumn making life impossible for the German garrisons in the Dodecanese as they tried to get out. She flew Operation Outing in September and Outing II from the end of that month into October, and was relieved on the 11th by Attacker.

The Aegean work was small, unromantic and dangerous. On 3 October, during strikes on shipping near Leros, Sub-Lieutenant D Stewart of 807 Squadron was hit by flak and baled out, and was killed. On the 9th, attacking Siebel ferries, Sub-Lieutenant J A Littler was hit and did not get out of his aircraft at all.

Over the period her squadron flew 102 sorties with seventeen Seafires and twenty-four pilots, and lost two aircraft and both their pilots to enemy fire.

She also carried out seven replenishment sessions, fuelling other ships of the force from her own tanks. An aircraft carrier is a large hull with a great deal of oil in it, and in a theatre with no friendly harbour worth the name that is sometimes the most valuable thing about her.

It is a long way from the popular idea of what a carrier does, and it is exactly the sort of job these ships spent their war doing.

Captain A D Torless relieved Captain McWilliam in the autumn. She was released from the Mediterranean at the end of October, reached the United Kingdom on 11 November, was allocated to the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron on 29 November, and went to Malta on 6 December for a tropical refit.

Rangoon

She sailed for Ceylon on 21 February 1945, arrived off the island on 20 March, and joined the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee. In April she went north with Emperor, Khedive and Stalker for Operation Dracula, the assault on Rangoon, sailing on the 23rd for Akyab and providing air cover for the assault convoys from the 30th.

The landing on 2 May was unopposed, the Japanese having already gone, but Hunter lost a pilot doing it. At 0931 that morning Sub-Lieutenant C de Grey Vyner RNVR, on his way to begin a beach cover patrol, was caught in his flight leader's slipstream while descending through heavy rain at five hundred feet, and went in.

Three more of her aircraft were wrecked on deck the same day, one of them so badly that it was simply pushed over the side. From the 5th to the 6th she was striking the Tenasserim coast between Mergui and Victoria Point.

Dukedom, Without a Shot

On 10 May the East Indies Fleet sailed as Force 61 after a Japanese force evacuating the Andamans, and Hunter went with it. She was then detached for Operation Mitre, the parallel sweep of the Malacca Strait, and she had no part in the attack on the heavy cruiser Haguro.

That attack was flown from Emperor, using Avengers borrowed from another ship because their own carrier's catapult had failed, and the story of the 530-mile round trip that produced the sighting report is in Emperor's article. The destroyers that ran the cruiser down in the small hours of 16 May are in the articles on HMS Venus (F50), HMS Verulam (F29) and HMS Rapid (F138).

Hunter carried Seafires and no Avengers at all, and it is worth saying plainly, because more than one published account of her career has quietly absorbed Emperor's day into hers.

What she did do was fight. On 16 May, attacking the Andaman Islands alongside Khedive and under Japanese air attack, her Seafires got among a formation of Ki-43 Oscars and at least four were believed damaged, two of them shared between Sub-Lieutenant W C Whitlam and Sub-Lieutenant L E Gardner.

Lieutenant Commander E J Clark hit the rounddown coming back aboard and ended up on his aircraft's nose, which by the standards of this ship's flight deck counts as a good outcome.

Penang

She sailed from Rangoon on 27 August 1945 as part of Vice Admiral Walker's force for the reoccupation of Penang, and on 2 September the formal surrender of Japanese forces in Malaya was signed aboard the battleship HMS Nelson (28) at George Town, with Hunter present.

That was the same day the wider surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay, and Nelson's article carries the details of the ceremony, including what happened to the Japanese admiral who signed it.

Singapore, and Home

A week later she was flying air cover over the Port Swettenham landings for Operation Zipper, and on 10 September she was one of four escort carriers to enter Singapore harbour. The formal surrender there followed on the 12th.

She left Singapore on 9 October, reached Belfast on the 30th, went round to the Clyde on 1 November to be de-stored and to land her British equipment, and sailed from Portsmouth on 12 December for Norfolk, Virginia. On 29 December 1945 she was returned to the United States Navy, and on 26 February 1946 she was struck for disposal.

Almdijk

She was sold to the Holland America Line on 17 January 1947, and then spent very nearly two years being turned back into what she had originally been drawn as. The flight deck came off, the hangar became cargo space, and on 17 November 1948 she entered merchant service as the SS Almdijk.

She was renamed Almdyk in 1953, traded for another dozen years, and was sold for breaking on 27 October 1965, arriving at Valencia in Spain on 2 November to be taken apart.

Khedive did the same thing under the same flag, and made rather more of a career of it. That comparison, and what it says about how thoroughly these ships were built as merchant hulls in the first place, is the closing argument of Khedive's article.

Hunter simply went quietly: twenty-four years old, three years of them spent as a warship.

Five Battle Honours and a Lesson About Landing

Her battle honours read Salerno 1943, Atlantic 1943 to 1944, South France 1944, Aegean 1944 and Burma 1945. It is a good list for a ship that was ordered as a freighter and spent three years in uniform, and it covers two invasions, an island campaign and a river assault on the other side of the world.

But the thing worth carrying away from her is smaller and more useful than a battle honour. At Salerno the Fleet Air Arm lost forty-two aeroplanes without a single one of them being shot down, because the sea was flat and the aircraft was wrong for the job.

Five carriers were in exactly the same water, in exactly the same calm, with exactly the same aeroplane. One of them broke fewer of them than the others, and the reason was that somebody aboard had spent the preceding weeks making the pilots practise.

Then, eleven months later, six of her own ratings were killed on that same deck by an aircraft that could not lower its flaps, and no amount of practice was going to change it. Both of those things are true about the same ship, and neither of them fits comfortably into the usual story about aircraft carriers. That is rather the point of telling it.