HMS Khedive (D62): The Escort Carrier That Spent Thirty Years as a Cargo Ship

Named After a Job That No Longer Existed

Khedive was the title borne by the viceroys of Egypt under Ottoman suzerainty, granted to Ismail Pasha in 1867 and carried by his successors until the office was swept away during the First World War.

By the time the Royal Navy attached it to a ship, no khedive had ruled anything for nearly thirty years. HMS Khedive was the first vessel ever to bear the name, which is a slightly odd way to honour a defunct Egyptian office, and, as it turned out, an unusually good piece of casting.

Britain's interest in the khedives was not sentimental. In November 1875 Disraeli borrowed four million pounds from Rothschilds overnight and bought the Khedive of Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal company, which is a large part of how Britain came to occupy Egypt seven years later.

That transaction turns up in these pages already, in the article on the ironclad HMS Iron Duke (1870), and it is worth holding on to, because this ship would spend a good deal of her war within sight of the consequences.

She began, though, as something much less exotic. She was laid down at the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation on 22 September 1942 on a United States Maritime Commission Type C3 cargo hull, and launched on 27 December that year as USS Cordova, sponsored by Mrs A E Mitchell.

Cordova, like a great many American escort carrier names, is a bay in Alaska, this one in the Alexander Archipelago in the south-east of the state. Her near sister HMS Emperor (D98) was named for Pybus Bay in the same waters, so two ships that would spend most of the war operating together were both named, in their first lives, after stretches of cold Alaskan coastline.

She was accepted from the builders on 23 August 1943 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on the 25th as HMS Khedive, pennant number D62, under Captain Henry John Haynes. She was one of the twenty-three ships the Royal Navy grouped as the Ruler class, whose other members appear throughout these pages: HMS Ruler (D72), HMS Atheling (D51) and HMS Empress (D42) among them.

Rosyth, and a Conversion Into Something Else

She sailed from Seattle for the Panama Canal on 23 September 1943, reached the Norfolk Navy Yard on 12 October for repairs and alterations, and then did what almost every new escort carrier did on her first crossing: she was loaded up as a freighter.

Avengers and Corsairs went aboard as deck and hangar cargo, loading finished on 1 November, and she took them across in convoy UT.4a out of New York, reaching the Clyde on 15 November and putting the aircraft ashore at Speke and Maydown.

The photograph in this article shows her from the beam off Greenock during Captain Haynes's time in command, which covers this whole period, and it sets out plainly what she was: a flat wooden deck laid on top of a merchant ship, with an island stuck on the side of it like an afterthought.

What happened next is the thing that separates her from most of her sisters. On 21 November she was allocated to Western Approaches Command and sent to Rosyth, and the dockyard there spent from December 1943 to February 1944 converting her not into a convoy escort but into an assault carrier, with extra radar, greatly expanded communications and heavier anti-aircraft armament.

The distinction matters. A convoy escort carrier hunts submarines in the middle of the Atlantic. An assault carrier parks off a hostile beach and runs fighters over an army, which is a job that requires the ability to talk to a great many people at once and to defend yourself while doing it.

Everything Khedive did for the rest of the war followed from that decision.

Twenty-Three Minutes Past Two in the Morning

She came out of Rosyth in March 1944 for post-refit trials, and at 0223 on the 22nd she was in collision with the merchant ship SS Stuart Queen. The damage was structural and she went to a Clyde yard to have it put right.

It is a small thing and it would not be worth a paragraph, except that she did it again in September, and then in May 1945 a destroyer did it to her.

Three collisions in fourteen months is a lot for a ship that never fought a surface action, and it says something true about escort carrier work that a service record rarely says out loud: these were slow, high-sided, awkward ships operating in crowded water with a great many other people, usually at night, usually darkened, and frequently manoeuvring to fly aircraft off while everyone around them was trying to do something else.

Seafires

On 1 April 1944 she embarked her first operational squadron, 899 Naval Air Squadron, flying Seafires, which came out to her from Belfast. They spent four weeks aboard on flying exercises before disembarking to Long Kesh in Northern Ireland on the 27th, re-embarked in May, and were at Scapa Flow by the 15th.

The Seafire was a navalised Spitfire, and its reputation for disliking carrier decks is dealt with at length in HMS Ruler's article. Khedive did not need the reputation explained to her.

Her own record from here to the end of the war is punctuated by barrier crashes, and in June, while she was being used for deck landing training for Barracuda pilots of 769 Squadron, she lost one on the first day: Sub-Lieutenant J W M Mellows RNVR was killed when the arrestor hook pulled clean out of his aircraft and it went over the side into the sea.

That is the first name on a list that would get considerably longer, and it is worth saying plainly at this point, because it is the truest thing about her: over her whole commission, Khedive's own flight deck killed more of her people than the enemy managed to.

Dragoon: 201 Sorties in Nine Days

She sailed from the Clyde at half past ten on the night of 15 July 1944 for Malta, and from there for the invasion of the south of France. She was part of Task Force 88, seven escort carriers under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge, whose flag was in the cruiser HMS Royalist (C89), and specifically of Task Group 88.1 alongside HMS Attacker, Emperor, HMS Pursuer (D73) and HMS Searcher.

She carried twenty-six Seafires of 899 Squadron. The landings went in on 15 August around Saint-Tropez, and what Task Force 88 achieved as a whole is covered in Royalist's article and in Emperor's.

Khedive's own contribution is unusually well recorded, and the numbers are worth setting out because they show what an escort carrier actually did during an invasion. Over nine days of operational flying, 899 Squadron flew 201 sorties: 144 as fighter-bombers, 48 as force cover over the fleet, and 9 as beach cover over the troops.

They fired 54,503 rounds of ammunition and dropped 141 loads of 500lb bombs. On 17 August her aircraft went for Port Cros with Emperor's, and on the 18th they were dive-bombing targets up the Rhone valley, well inland, which for a squadron of short-legged Spitfires flying off a converted cargo ship is a considerable reach.

The cost was four aircraft and two pilots. Sub-Lieutenant E A Gentry RNVR was hit, baled out over the sea and was picked up by the battleship HMS Ramillies (07), which is a fine example of what all those old battleships were still good for in 1944.

Sub-Lieutenant J G Barrett RNVR was killed attacking the coastal batteries near Toulon. On 19 August she was shifted to Task Group 88.2, worked independently until the 23rd, then rejoined 88.1 for the last of it, and was released on the 27th.

The King of Egypt Comes Aboard

She reached Alexandria on 2 September 1944 for repairs and replenishment, and there occurred the single most improbable thing in her record. King Farouk of Egypt was entertained aboard.

Consider the arrangement. The Royal Navy had taken an American cargo hull, put a flight deck on it, and named it after the office of the Egyptian viceroys, an office Britain had comprehensively finished off during the First World War and which had not existed since.

It then sailed the result into Alexandria and gave lunch aboard her to the man who actually ruled Egypt, whose great-grandfather had held the very title painted on her stern. Everyone involved appears to have found this perfectly normal.

Farouk's own ending was less comfortable, and it is told in these pages by a ship that inherited Khedive's pennant number. The Battle-class destroyer HMS Jutland (D62) was in the Canal Zone in January 1952 when the clash at Ismailia set off the rioting in Cairo that made the monarchy's position impossible, and six months later the Free Officers deposed him.

Eight years after he came aboard a British escort carrier named after his ancestors' title, he was on a yacht heading for exile.

The Aegean: Commandos, Caiques and a Second Merchant Ship

From Alexandria she joined Force 120, the British Aegean Force, whose job was to make the eastern Mediterranean as difficult as possible for German troops trying to get out of Greece and the islands. She sailed for Operation Outing I and from 9 September was attacking shipping and shore targets on Crete, Scarpanto and Rhodes, then flying combat air patrols and covering minesweeping through to the 20th.

On 14 September she covered Operation Aplomb, a landing on the Greek island of Kithera by Fox Force, made up of 9th Commando and four patrols of the Special Boat Squadron.

It was the curtain-raiser for Operation Manna and the Allied return to Athens, and it is exactly the kind of small, precise job an assault carrier had been converted to do: put fighters over a few hundred commandos going ashore on an island nobody has heard of, and keep them there.

Six days before that, on 8 September, she had been in collision with the merchant ship SS Ocean Messenger. That is two merchantmen in under six months.

In the autumn, at Alexandria, Captain Haynes was relieved by Captain David Henry Magnay. Khedive sailed for home on 1 October with Pursuer and Searcher, reached Belfast on the 12th, put her aircraft ashore, and on the 23rd went into a commercial yard in London Docks for a refit.

A New Ocean and a New Aeroplane

She came out of London with a different air group. On 5 January 1945 she embarked the twenty-four Hellcats of 808 Naval Air Squadron, the Seafires having gone, and sailed from the Clyde on the 11th with HMS Speaker and HMS Slinger.

She was through the Suez Canal on 24 January, landed reserve aircraft at Cochin on 3 February, and reported for duty with the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron of the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee on the 11th.

Her second war looked nothing like her first. In the Mediterranean she had been putting fighter-bombers over beaches in Europe.

In the Bay of Bengal she was one of a handful of small carriers covering an enormous, thinly held ocean, working with battleships, hunting airfields and photographing coastlines that nobody had a decent chart of.

The Flight Deck Was the Dangerous Part

April 1945 was the worst month of her commission, and not one casualty in it was caused by the Japanese.

On the afternoon of Sunday 8 April, as she was flying aircraft on from Trincomalee, Chief Petty Officer Pilot C E Gregory crashed into the starboard quarter of the rounddown, the curved after lip of the flight deck. His aircraft burst into flames and went over the side, and he was killed.

The fire effectively destroyed the flight deck steering position and the starboard depth charge racks.

Two days later it was worse. At 0838 on 10 April, during a rehearsal, Hellcat JV144 came in, crashed through the barriers and went over the bow, taking with it JV298, which was parked forward. The pilot, Lieutenant P A Sherry RNVR, was lost with his aircraft.

So were three of the deck party: Leading Seaman J Johnson RNR, Leading Radio Mechanic A Catherall and Air Mechanic W B McClory, the last two lost overboard and never recovered. Four men in one landing.

On 25 April, during exercises after the operation, Sub-Lieutenant H T Welker RNVR missed every arrestor wire, went through the barriers and carried on into the aircraft park, writing off three Hellcats and damaging two more. Nobody was killed in that one, which given the geometry of it was pure luck.

These were not exceptional events for a small carrier with a short deck, a heavy American fighter and a great many young pilots. They were the ordinary working risk, and the reason to set them out here is that they are almost always left out. Khedive lost two aircrew to enemy action in two years of war. She lost six men on or off her own flight deck.

Sunfish, and Ten Oscars Over Sabang

She sailed on 8 April as Group 2 of Force 63 for Operation Sunfish, in company with Emperor, the cruiser HMS Cumberland (57) and the destroyers Venus and Virago, the heavy end of the force being the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Free French Richelieu.

On 11 April her Hellcats were over the bombardment of Sabang when the force was attacked by ten Japanese Oscars. Two were destroyed. Sub-Lieutenant R J Foxley of the New Zealand reserve chased one down and destroyed it, and a second was badly damaged by Sub-Lieutenants J P West-Taylor and A L Bedding.

From the 14th to the 16th she was photographing and attacking Emmahaven and Padang on the Sumatran coast, and she was back at Trincomalee on the 20th. Over the whole operation her squadron flew 113 sorties and 203 hours and 49 minutes in the air, losing four Hellcats in deck crashes and the two pilots already named, which is the same arithmetic as before.

Rangoon, and a Destroyer Runs Into Her

She sailed for Akyab on 23 April for Operation Dracula, the assault on Rangoon, as part of the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron. The landings went in on 2 May at Kyauktan, and the carriers flew a hundred sorties between them on the first day, split between force cover, beach cover and fighter-bomber work.

There was nothing to fight. The Japanese had already left Rangoon, which is the best possible outcome for an assault and a thoroughly anticlimactic one for a squadron that had spent a fortnight preparing.

On 4 May, at a quarter to eleven in the morning, the destroyer HMS Virago was disengaging from a manoeuvre and put her bow into Khedive's port side aft, between the sponsons. The damage to both ships was minor and above the waterline.

It was her third collision in fourteen months, and the only one of the three where the record is explicit about which ship went into which.

Her squadron flew 75 sorties and 110 hours and 35 minutes over the operation, and lost one pilot and three Hellcats, all in a single day.

Dukedom, From the Covering Force

On 10 May the East Indies Fleet sailed at short notice as Force 61, after a Japanese force evacuating the Andaman Islands. Khedive flew attacks on Car Nicobar on the 11th and took part in the search for the heavy cruiser Haguro and the destroyer Kamikaze on the 14th and 15th, but she was not directly involved in what followed.

What followed is well covered elsewhere. The air search, the borrowed Avengers and the 530-mile round trip that produced the sighting report are in Emperor's article, and the destroyers that ran the cruiser down in the Malacca Strait in the small hours of 16 May are in the articles on HMS Venus (F50), HMS Verulam (F29) and HMS Rapid (F138).

Khedive's part was to be one of the ships that made the search possible and then be somewhere else when it paid off, which is the honest description of a great deal of naval warfare.

On the 16th she was attacking the Andamans with HMS Hunter under Japanese air attack, and she was back at Trincomalee on the 19th.

Balsam

Between 14 and 23 June she was out again with Force 63 for Operation Balsam, photographing and then attacking the Japanese airfields in northern Sumatra: Lhokseumawe, Medan, Binjai. The claim for the operation was three enemy aircraft destroyed, seven left burning and probably destroyed, and nine damaged, which for a few days' work by one squadron off one small carrier is a substantial return.

It cost her the squadron's commanding officer. Lieutenant Commander O F Whatley RNVR of 808 Squadron was killed over Medan airfield when flak took the tail off his Hellcat and the aircraft went in burning. He was the second and last of her aircrew to be killed by the enemy.

An Operation Overtaken by Events

She sailed on 10 August as part of Force 61 for Operation Carson, strikes on Penang and Medan. On the 11th the force was ordered to hold west of longitude 90 east and wait, and the operation was then cancelled outright as news came in that Japan was willing to accept the surrender terms.

On 15 August the signal went out to all ships to suspend offensive operations against Japanese forces, and Khedive spent VJ Day at Trincomalee. Captain Arthur Reid Pedder had taken command in late August.

The flying accidents carried on regardless, because working up never stops for a peace treaty. On 23 August one pilot hit the rounddown hard enough to smash the rear fuselage of his aircraft, and the following day another broke his arrestor hook clean off. Both walked away.

Jurist, Zipper and Singapore

Her last operation was the reoccupation of Malaya, in company with the battleship HMS Nelson (28), the Free French Richelieu, Royalist and a group of escort carriers. She was through the Malacca Strait on 4 September, flying over the landings on the 9th, and on 10 September she entered Singapore with Emperor, Hunter and Stalker.

She was there on 12 September for the formal surrender of Japanese forces, and Nelson's article covers the parallel surrender at Penang.

She was released from the East Indies Fleet on the 13th. Her war had lasted twenty-five months and had taken her from the Firth of Forth to the Riviera, the Dodecanese, the Bay of Bengal and the Malacca Strait, and it was over.

Rempang

She called at Trincomalee, Durban and Colombo, sailed for the United Kingdom on 13 November 1945 with 808 Squadron aboard, and reached Belfast on 5 December. On 4 January 1946 she left the Clyde for Norfolk, Virginia by way of Halifax, and on 26 January she was formally returned from Royal Navy loan service to the United States Navy.

That is where most escort carrier stories stop, usually with a scrapyard. Hers does not. She was modified to carry personnel and spent 1946 and 1947 on trooping duties, and then, at the end of the decade, she was sold out of naval service altogether and rebuilt as what she had originally been drawn as.

The flight deck came off. The hangar became cargo space. She emerged as the motor vessel Rempang under the Dutch flag, and spent the 1950s and 1960s carrying freight around Europe, working cargo in Bremen and elsewhere with nothing about her to suggest she had ever flown Seafires over Saint-Tropez.

In 1968 she was sold to Italian owners, renamed Daphne and put under the Panamanian flag, and she carried on trading until the middle of the 1970s. She was finally sold for demolition at Gandia in Spain, on 20 January 1976.

She was thirty-three years old. She had spent two and a half of those years as a warship and roughly thirty as a merchant ship, which means that for something like nine tenths of her working life she was doing precisely the job the original American drawings had specified, and the aircraft carrier was the interruption.

Four Battle Honours and a Long Retirement

Her battle honours read South France 1944, Aegean 1944, Burma 1945 and East Indies 1945. Four is not many by the standards of a fleet carrier, but it is four more than a cargo ship usually manages, and the geography behind them is remarkable for a hull laid down in Seattle as a freighter: the beaches of Provence, the Greek islands, the approaches to Rangoon and the Sumatran airfields.

What stays with you about Khedive, though, is not the honours. It is the shape of the thing. A Royal Navy that named her after an Egyptian office nobody had held since 1914, and then entertained the King of Egypt aboard her at Alexandria.

A ship that hit two merchantmen and was hit by a destroyer without ever once exchanging fire with an enemy vessel. A flight deck that killed three times as many of her people as the Japanese and the Germans combined.

And an ending in which she quietly took her flight deck off, went back to carrying cargo, and outlived almost every ship she ever sailed with.

Escort carriers were built to be temporary. Khedive took that instruction rather more literally than most, and then declined to die for another thirty years.