HMS Nairana (D05): Hunting U-Boats With Walker, Arctic Gales and the Dutch Navy's First Carrier

From Clydebank

HMS Nairana was laid down by John Brown at Clydebank on 7 November 1941 as a refrigerated cargo ship. In March 1942, with the Atlantic convoys desperately short of air cover, the Admiralty acquired the unfinished hull and had the builders complete her as an escort carrier.

She was launched on 20 May 1943 and was the second ship of the Navy to carry the name, after a seaplane carrier of the First World War, and her badge was a golden eagle in flight on a blue field.

During the war she was adopted by the people of Spenborough in the West Riding, who had raised money for the escort destroyer Airedale in their Warship Week in March 1942, only for Airedale to be lost in the Mediterranean that June.

She gave her name to the Nairana Class, three British escort carriers built on merchant hulls, with her sister Vindex on the Tyne and Campania at Belfast. They were slower and plainer than the American-built escort carriers, with two diesel engines, a single lift and a steel flight deck, but their hangars and decks were part of the ship's structure, and they stood up well to northern weather.

Her first captain was Captain Raymond Taylor, who had joined her at the end of August 1943 while she was fitting out. Her trials were finished on 12 December 1943, and she sailed to work up for the Western Approaches Command.

In January 1944 her aircraft practised attacks off Larne on the submarine Tantalus, which was about to sail for the Far East, where she made the longest submarine patrol of the war.

With Walker in the Atlantic

On 25 January 1944 she embarked 835 Naval Air Squadron, with nine Swordfish for anti-submarine work and six Sea Hurricanes to fight off German aircraft, and the squadron stayed with her until the spring of 1945.

Four days later she joined the best known anti-submarine group of the war, Captain Frederic Walker's 2nd Escort Group of sloops, led by Starling with Kite, Wild Goose, Magpie and Woodpecker, together with the escort carrier Activity. While the carriers gave the group air cover, it hunted U-boats across the routes used by the convoys to and from Gibraltar and Canada.

On 31 January Starling, Wild Goose and Magpie sank U-592 south-west of Ireland with all hands. In the three weeks that followed the group sank five more, and the last of them, U-264, sunk by Woodpecker and Starling on 19 February, was the first U-boat with a schnorkel breathing tube to be destroyed. All 52 of her men were taken prisoner.

For the airmen these weeks were costly. On 5 February a Swordfish failed to return from an anti-submarine sweep far out in the Atlantic, and Sub Lieutenants Costello and Dalton and Leading Airman Nield were lost. Landing on her short, pitching deck, by day and by night, wrecked aircraft one after another.

On 19 February the squadron's commanding officer crashed through the barrier into the parked aircraft and was relieved of his command, and on 4 March a Swordfish went over the side during a night landing, drowning Sub Lieutenant Wilmot and Leading Airman Ferguson; only Sub Lieutenant Arber was saved.

Through the spring and summer she worked on the convoy routes between the Clyde and Gibraltar, often in company with Activity. In March she brought home the troop convoy MKF 29 from the Mediterranean with the battleship Warspite, and in April and May she covered the combined convoys from Sierra Leone and Gibraltar.

In May she joined the sweeps north-west of Ireland, where U-boats passing between Norway and the Atlantic were being hunted.

The Ju 290s

The greater danger on the Gibraltar route by then came from the air. The Germans had long-range Junkers Ju 290s at Mont-de-Marsan near Bordeaux, which shadowed the convoys and reported them to the U-boats.

On 25 May Nairana and the frigates Louis and Inglis joined the homeward convoy SL 158 west of Portugal, and early on 26 May two Ju 290s came out to look for it. At twenty past seven that morning two Sea Hurricanes, flown by Sub Lieutenants Burgham and Richardson, caught one of the big four-engined aircraft and shot it down.

Richardson flew into the sea as he broke away from the attack and was killed; the destroyer Highlander recovered his body. At a quarter past four in the afternoon Sub Lieutenants Mearns and Wallis found another Ju 290 and brought it down too, and the frigate Inglis picked up five of its crew as prisoners.

It was a rare success for the handful of fighters an escort carrier could carry. In June she sailed with the troop convoys KMF 32 and MKF 32, and in July Captain Taylor handed over to Captain Villiers Surtees, who was to command her through the hardest months of her war.

North Russia

In October 1944 she was lent to the Home Fleet for the Arctic convoys, with 835 Squadron re-equipped with fourteen Swordfish and six Wildcats. On 22 October she sailed with Tracker, Vindex and twelve frigates of the escort groups to cover JW 61 to the Kola Inlet, and all the merchant ships arrived without loss, largely because of the strength of the escort and the air cover.

On the way home with RA 61 the frigates went out first to hunt the U-boats waiting off Kola, and on 2 November the frigate Mounsey was hit by a homing torpedo from U-295, though she got back into harbour.

At the end of November she sailed again for JW 62 with Campania and the cruiser Bellona, and this time her fighters were busy. The outward passage was unharmed, and before the return convoy RA 62 sailed the corvette Bamborough Castle sank U-387 off the Kola coast.

On 11 December the destroyer Cassandra had her bow blown off by U-365, and that day Sub Lieutenant Blanco shot down a shadowing Blohm and Voss flying boat. On 12 December Sub Lieutenant Gordon shot down another in flames, and Sub Lieutenant Millar destroyed a Ju 88 but was hit by its return fire and never came back to the ship.

On 13 December two Swordfish from Campania found U-365 and sank her with all hands.

A strike on shipping near Vaagso, planned for New Year's Day 1945, was called off because of the weather. At the end of January she went back with the escort carrier Premier, and on the night of Operation Winded her Swordfish and Campania's hit four German merchant ships of between 1,000 and 2,500 tons off the Norwegian coast, leaving one burning and another aground. All the aircraft came back.

In February the two carriers went north together for JW 64 and RA 64, under Rear Admiral Roderick McGrigor in Campania. The Germans tried hard to stop the convoy.

On 7 February the torpedo bombers came in force, and six Ju 88s were shot down by the Wildcats of the two carriers and a seventh by the guns of the corvette Denbigh Castle. Three days later seven more aircraft were brought down by the fighters and the convoy's guns, though the merchant ships' gunners were so ready to fire at anything in the sky that the carriers' own aircraft were in danger.

Off Kola Denbigh Castle was torpedoed and lost, and on 17 February the sloop Lark sank U-425 with the corvette Alnwick Castle and was then torpedoed herself. On the way home, on 20 February, Blanco and Gordon shot down a Ju 88 and two more of her pilots probably destroyed another.

RA 64 met gales of Force 11, and on 21 February the convoy had to be scattered. Nairana and Campania came into Scapa Flow on 27 February.

Her last operations were off Norway in March 1945, with Searcher, Puncher and Queen, against shipping in the coastal leads. On 26 March Wildcats of the force fought eight to ten Messerschmitt 109s, shooting down three and damaging two, and on 28 March a Firefly flying from Nairana led fifteen Wildcats of 882 Squadron against shipping at Aalesund and set a wireless station on fire.

The force came back to Scapa on 29 March, 835 Squadron was disbanded two days later, and she went to Belfast for a long refit. The war in Europe ended while she was in dock.

Karel Doorman and Port Victor

She was damaged leaving the dry dock in August 1945, and after repairs she was used as a deck landing training carrier. From 20 September young pilots of 768 Squadron practised on her deck, and from 30 October to 15 November she embarked twelve Barracudas of 860 Squadron, a squadron of the Royal Netherlands Navy, for training at sea.

Fireflies of 816 Squadron followed, with six landing accidents in three weeks. In January 1946 she went into a Clyde dockyard to be prepared for a loan to the Dutch.

On 23 March 1946 she was handed over to the Royal Netherlands Navy and commissioned as HrMs Karel Doorman, named after the Dutch admiral killed in the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942. She was the first aircraft carrier the Dutch Navy ever had.

When the Netherlands bought the light fleet carrier Venerable, which took over the same name, Nairana was handed back to the Royal Navy on 28 May 1948.

She was sold straight away to the Port Line and converted back into a cargo ship at Belfast, and as Port Victor she carried refrigerated cargo for more than twenty years, the trade she had been laid down for. She was broken up at Faslane from July 1971.

Her bell is kept at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton, beside the bell of her sister Vindex.

Nairana earned the battle honours Atlantic 1944, Arctic 1944 to 1945 and Norway 1945. The other ships of her class are in the Nairana Class escort carriers collection.